Ordering Information

Tomi on Twitter is @tomiahonen

Follow Tomi on Twitter as @tomiahonenFollow Tomi's Twitterfloods on all matters mobile, tech and media. Tomi has over 8,000 followers and was rated by Forbes as the most influential writer on mobile related topics

Book Tomi T Ahonen to Speak at Your Event

Contact Tomi T Ahonen for Speaking and Consulting Events

Please write email to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com and indicate "Speaking Event" or "Consulting Work" or "Expert Witness" or whatever type of work you would like to offer. Tomi works regularly on all continents

Tomi on Video including his TED Talk

Tomi on Video including his TED TalkSee Tomi on video from several recent keynote presentations and interviews, including his TED Talk in Hong Kong about Augmented Reality as the 8th Mass Media

Virtual Worlds

May 20, 2013

So yeah, I had the honor of speaking twice at this year's MMA Forum event in New York City. And as the conference hotel was the Marriott Marquis, right on Broadway, I can say that I've 'done Broadway' haha...

But apart from my presentations - you may enjoy 'Around the World in 80 Slides' about the status of mobile marketing outside of the USA (the slideshare presentation has had over 6,000 views, wow, in just over one week!). Lets talk about what else happened at the MMA Forum. Here is my update of the latest thinking from many of the best marketing and advertising minds of Madison Avenue, and how they now see mAd as in Mobile Advertising, and the more broad term, Mobile Marketing, in the context of other modern marketing tools and methods. The mAd industry is maturing nicely. I was very VERY impressed with what all is being discovered, discussed and disseminated.

This blog is a collection of my notes from the MMA Forum. As the event ran mostly on three threads, I could not obviously attend all presentations, so please take this not as a comprehensive review but rather a sampling of what we learned. And in no particular order, lets see what brands were saying what about mobile.

MACY'S DEPARTMENT STORE

Jennifer Kasper, the VP of Digital at Macy's, yes the world's largest department store, gave a keynote to the MMA Forum. She said that if Disney can turn from an entertainment company into a retailer, why can't Macy's turn from a retailer into an entertainment company. And she pointed out that in New York City, the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade is truly an institution, one that is covered nationally on TV. Jennifer made a wonderful observation about mobile phones in the stores: before we consumers were being yelled at for using our phones in the stores, now we are being encouraged to use them. And as to mobile marketing, how about this innovation - we all know that TV shows can be interactive via SMS, like American Idol and Eurovision etc, what about TV ads? Macy's has introduced TV ads that invite TV viewers to respond live, and even make purchases straight off the live TV advertisement.

ANNHEUSER-BUSCH INBEV

We had the privilege of hearing Winston Wang give a keynote too. And boy, was that packed with all the right things to say, and just about everything you ever wanted to know about mobile when used in marketing. Winston was like a rapid-fire quote machine. My notes about his keynote ran 20 separate items and honestly, I could write a long blog just about what all he said, and the insights his comments reveal and contain. Also, as already wrote on Twitter when Winston was speaking, I could use a Winston Wang beer quotation at the end of just about every slide I show about mobile marketing, haha, they were all totally the right message and totally up-to-date and so comprehensive they truly covered the whole moblie marketing spectrum. But let me try to summarize it to a few of the best lines and examples.

To start with, a lovely beer quote: Physical social is beer, digital social is mobile; innovation opportunity lies in the middle. Winston also said everyone's attention is going to mobile. Mobile will connect marketing and sales. Mobile is measurable like nothing else before. Mobile amplifies events. Mobile is not just B2C, its C2C (Tomi comment: Cool !!! truly in the spirit of Communities Dominate Brands the book and the origins of this blog). And get this, Winston ended his presentation advising the audience to use 'Tomi Ahonen's 9 unique aspects of mobile' to create winning mobile concepts. Thanks Winston! The beers are on me!

But I'm not done with Winston Wang. Those were selected pearls of his many quotes. What is Annheuser-Busch Inbev, the world's largest beer brewery doing in mobile? Well, as Winston is their Director of Innovation, you can guess its plenty, across all their brands. Like Stella Artois, which has an advergame about pouring the beer correctly (using the sensors of the smartphone). This game is also a virtual tutor/mentor to train the proper speed to pour Stella Artois (which is obviously VERY slow and STEADY to ge the right head on the beer). They have an AR app to find the nearest bars and pubs that serve Stella Artois.

Or how about the Bud Light Sports Fan beer app. It is designed for second screen use (ie simultaneously while watching a live sports game on the TV ie first screen, you pull up the Bud Light Sports Fan on your smartphone or tablet for your second screen experience as you watch the live game). The app poses relevant questions about the live game for fans to react to, giving away prizes for the best answer or best guess. Some questions ask for predictions of game results and game events for that live game. Other questions are trivia about that sport and the teams involved etc. Very engaging.

HOME DEPOT

Yet another brilliant presentation was by Trish Mueller the Chief Marketing Officer of Home Depot, the world's largest tool (and garden furniture) retailer. She gave tons of examples and said that whereas a real bricks-and-mortar superstore of Home Depot can only stock 35,000 items to sell, the mobile phone has an 'endless aisle' and they currently stock 400,000 items for sale on the phone screen. Home Depot has found that more searches already come from mobile phones than traditional PC based internet.

The Home Depot shopping app has several brlliant ideas, including an on-screen measurement tool for measuring bolt sizes, to an Augmented Reality furniture virtual tester, using the cameraphone to place garden furniture into your yard or balcony, to see how it looks and fits. Their app includes the 'talk to the hand' option where shoppers can talk directly to Home Depot advisors rather than sending questions. The Home Depot app has been downloaded 3.5 million times

UPS

UPS the package delivery company has deployed a solution to let consumers decide where the final delivery of the package will take place. They want to deliver only once, to the best address. So if you will be home, thats fine. If you prefer the package delivered to your office, thats fine. If you're at the hospital today because your child is suddenly ill, have the package delivered to the hospital reception, etc... It saves UPS tons of money from not having to make unncessary delivery attempts.

STATS STATS STATS

And we heard a ton of new stats. Many were familiar to my readers and/or nicely quoted my stats, from the 'more mobile phones than toothbrushes' to the 150 times per day stat. But here were new stats for us to now quote in our presentations and articles about mobile marketing:

Time Inc: People check news on their phones 40x per day

MMA: 91% of mobile phone users have their phones 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (ie also sleep with the phones)

The Weather Channel: most mobile users of their service spend more than 1 hour per week on weather news

AT&T: 88% of US consumers watch the 2nd screen (mobile) while watching TV

MMA: 43% of Americans use mobile as their primary search tool

Nielsen: USA has 89 million mobile shoppers

Rovio: Angry Birds has passed 1.7 Billion cumulative downloads

Millenial Media: There are now more mobile phone connections than humans alive

Mondelez: Mobile increases impulse buys inside shops by 18%

MMA: 49% of US consumers have changed their purchase decision inside a store because of mobile

Google: 8 in 10 smartphone shoppers use their phone in the store to help them shop

3Seventy - Brands see a 25 dollar return for every 1 dollar spent on SMS

MMA: Mobile coupons get 10x better redemption rates than eCoupons

MORE MOBILE FIRST COMPANIES

We heard several more companies embracing 'Mobile first' for their digital strategy (ie design for the small screen first, before designing for the old-fashioned PC based legacy internet). Home Depot said they are a mobile first company. JP Morgan Chase bank said you have to have a mobile first strategy. Starbucks says nothing is more important than mobile. Rovio said Angry Birds would not have been possible had Rovio not been a mobile first company. (and its nice to see my thinking from my 2002 book m-Profits now embraced so widely by such a diverse range of giant companies, as the right way forward..)

QUOTES

There were so many good quotes that came from the event. Here is a sampling of my faves:

Geo-fencing is so 2012 - Saatchi's Media Director, Gabriel Chang

Phones have taken the place of the cigarette break - Google Head of Mobile and Social Tim Reis

Mobile is augmented humanity - Google Head of Mobile and Social Tim Reis

Shoppers who use mobile more, buy more - Google Head of Mobile and Social Tim Reis

This event heard the mantra that the best way to reach your whole audience is SMS text messaging. We had continuously SMS examples and stats (most very familiar to those who follow my writings) but this was very refreshing to me, as in the past there was plenty of the misguided view that one should do a smartphone app for example, rather than use SMS. Now it was a near-unanimous view by all speakers that anyone in the audience had to do SMS first.

And many then also mentioned that the next thing to do after SMS, was MMS. Like Gary Schwartz the author said at the event, if you include purchase uption to a marketing SMS, your response rates shoot up 3-fold. But if you use MMS and include purchase option, compared to basic SMS informational/advertising/branding messages, MMS will get you a 6-fold increase in response rates. Like I say, MMS is the ultimate wet dream for anyone in marketing and advertising, its everything you ever wanted SMS to be, if you are in advertising, marketing or media. No, MMS is not the perfect picture-sharing method for consumer-to-consumer communications (although we can use it for that as well). But MMS is indeed the ultimate brand messaging tool for their marketing communications, and increasingly the MMA Forum speakers held this view too. Very nice to hear.

PIZZA BUTTON

Finally a truly brilliant idea from Dubai. Red Tomato Pizza has deployed a very simple fridge magnet, that includes a GSM chip and data connection to their pizza ordering system. Your fridge magnet looks like a pizza slice, and lets you configure your pizza exactly as you like it, pepperoni or tutti-di-mare or vegetable or extra cheese etc, and when you're ready? Just press the button. Your pizza is delivered in 30 minutes to your door. Just press the button. Gotta love it!

Thats my quick view to the best MMA event yet. If you see an MMA event near your neighborhood, come there and meet the industry leaders and learn about the best ideas in this, the most creative dimension of the best age of innovation, with the most powerful digital platform ever deployed: mobile. And if you want to see my Around the World in 80 Slides survey of mobile marketing outside of the USA, check out my slides of my MMA Forum presentation via Slideshare.

January 10, 2013

I want to talk about Engagement Marketing today. I have been
planning this blog article not for months, for years, and I always put it off,
as I find my draft has gone out-of-date and I never end up finishing my primer
about this radical advertising concept. But I took advantage of the holiday
season and updated all of this again and now finally am ready to post my
definitive blog about Engagement Marketing and mobile. You may want to bookmark
this blog. And yes, this is a chapter-length article, runs about 9,000 words on the cutting edge of mobile advertising with tons of stats and astonishing case studies and I promise you, massive response rates. Massive. Nothing you ever get online, ever ever EVER.

SHOCKING STATS

And I like to start with the stats. This spring mobile phone subscriptions on
the planet will grow past the total human population alive. That means, yes, 7.1 Billion active mobile phone accounts on the planet with a population of 7.1 Billion people alive from babies to great grandparents. Yes the Mobile
Moment is nigh. But that is not shocking (not to readers of this blog anyway) nearly 100 countries have passed 100% per-capita mobile penetration rates, even the USA joined the club two years ago... No, lets look at the addiction level. T-Mobile USA reported that the average cellphone user in America looks the
phone 150 times per day. The Guardian published a stat last year that for
smartphone owners in Britain, its 200 times per day. If you look at your phone
200 times per day, its once every 5 minutes of every waking hour. No other
media has ever had this level of addictive behavior. And even this is not
shocking to my regular readers on the Communities Dominate blog. Lets get to
mobile marketing..

SMS RULES

The Digital Marketing Association reports that 97% of
messages sent via SMS are read, compared to only 20% of emails that are read.
Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator reports, that SMS text messages are read on
average within 5 seconds of receipt (and I always add, that email stats say
average emails are read within 24 hours). The Mobile Data Association reports
that SMS text messages have an average response rate of 26% compared to 5% for
email. Did I get your attention?

And how does the UK, the country where the world's first SMS
was sent, take advantage of this lightning-fast media format, that reaches
every pocket and has massively higher 'open' rates than email? 26% of UK
businesses still in this day and age, literally 20 years from the first SMS, never
use SMS, based on the 2012 survey of UK businesses by Textlocal 2012. Of the
74% of UK businesses that do use SMS, check out this experience: 88% found SMS marketing effective vs 11% not effective by
the same Textlocal survey.

Now for the sickening part. An October 2012 survey of UK consumers by
Textmarketing found that 89% would like to receive parcel delivery notices via
SMS, but only 26% in Britain had received any. 84% would like appointment
reminders like from doctors, hairdressers, dentists etc, but only 29% had
received any. 68% of British consumers would like to receive offers and
discounts from the brands they use, but only 12% had received any! What a
massive, massive gap between what consumers want, and what UK businesses
deliver, in the country where SMS was first enabled, and a country that passed 100%
per-capita mobile subscription penetration level ten years ago.

Before you Americans snicker at those British statistics, don't forget that the
USA lags Europe in mobile, so its actually worse in the USA. For example, a November
2012 Pew survey found that while 80% of Americans use SMS text messaging, only
9% had received any kind of alerts from their health providers. I delivered a
keynote to SOCAP the biggest international customer relationship management
association in the USA, the audience was stunned and shocked by what all I told
them about mobile and SMS. These were customer relationship VPs and directors
for Fortune 500 companies, and they were not aware of how massive this
opportunity is today. So yes, don't snicker there across the Atlantic..

DON'T COPY WHAT IS HATED

So we know that consumers hate interruptive ads on TV and on the internet. We
have created perfect mobile clones of those hated ads, but now deploy them on
the most personal, the most intimate mass media ever, the mobile. And we find
that people hate banner ads and pre-roll video even more on mobile than they do
on TV and the internet. A brand new December 2012 Forrester survey of consumers
found that mobile banner ads and pre-roll video interruptive ads on mobile are
hated more than TV ads! 62% found mobile banner ads annoying, and 73% found
pre-roll video ads on mobile annoying! Whereas SMS text messaging that had been
opted in, scored consistently better than any other ad formats and - get this -
47% of US consumers in 2012 - felt that opt-in based SMS ads were useful !

So we copy what is hated, meanwhile there are mass media
communication formats that are beloved by consumers, that reach a far larger
audience, and achieve far greater satisfaction and far less rejection than
interruptive ads - ie SMS and MMS - mobile messaging - and in countless uses,
the consumers hope, ask for and even expect to be communicated with by using
this method - and the brands hide their heads in the sand. What is wrong with
this picture? I am so frustrated reading the surveys and analysis of big brands
and ad campaigns conducted in 'my backyard' ie in mobile media, where the
giants utterly misunderstand this media opportunity and proceed to wantonly
destroy consumer satisfaction and affection.

E EQUALS M 2 C

My very dear friend and one of the earliest pioneers of mobile advertising and
marketing is Spanish mobile maven, Agustin Calvo. He ran Movidreams in Spain
and founded Qustodian to specialize in mobile marketing. He just tweeted a few
weeks ago a funny formula playhing on Einstein's famous law of relativity:

E = M2C

Engagemement = Mobile To Community

I very much love this formula, it encapsulates so much of
what should be done - and so painfully often is not done - in mobile
advertising and marketing today. Engagement equals Mobile to Community. Just
look at a banner ad or pre-roll video ad today. They are 'Mobile To Consumer'
not 'Mobile To Community'. The ads are interruptive in nature and are not in
any way built to entice consumer engagement with the consumer's community of
interest. That may result in 'interaction' of a consumer clicking on the banner
ad or link - and if the video is funny, it might even become 'viral' but it is
not Engagement Marketing. It may even be 'engaging' with a consumer, but is not
'Engagement Marketing' to empower a community. Where is the distinction and
difference. I will spend this blog discussing the depth of Engagement Marketing
to the best of my understanding of it.

ALAN MOORE INVENTED ENGAGEMENT MARKETING

So we go to the source. Alan Moore, yes 'our' Alan Moore the
co-author of the signature book to this blog - Communities Dominate Brands -
the British veteran ad industry guru who has written several books on mobile
and tech (not to be confused with the 'other' Alan Moore the science fiction
writer). Alan coined the term Engagement Marketing more than a decade ago and
has been teaching the world about it ever since. Lets take the defiition here
to be very clear:

DEFINITION OF ENGAGEMENT MARKETING

Engagement Marketing is the process of involving consumers
in the co-creation of brand experiences.

Engagement Marketing is not 'Engagement Advertising' alone.
It can involve the advertising side of marketing, but marketing as a science
and discipline covers far more than marketing communications ie advertising.
Marketing according to classic Kotler involves the Four P's of Product
(design), Place (distribution channel), Price and Promotion (which includes but
is not limited to advertising; promotion also includes other actions such as
public relations, publicity etc).

INTERACTIVE IS NOT SAME AS ENGAGEMENT

Interactive Advertising (or Marketing) is not the same as
Engagement Marketing although very many who talk about making their advertising
or marketing campaigns 'engaging' will think that making them interactive is
the same thing. The definition says 'co-creation'. If I click on a link to your
web page, and go to your product catalog and select the particular color of the
t-shirt I want to buy, that is all very interactive, but it is not engagement
marketing, because I was not involved in the 'co-creation' of that brand
experience in any way. I navigated the brand's tightly controlled environment.
It was interactive but not Engagement Marketing.

Compare to this example - if it is Nike's T-shirt design page, and I am allowed
to upload my own photo to paint onto the Nike T-Shirt which will still carry
the Nike 'swoosh' logo - now we have co-created something together. Only then
is it 'Engagement Marketing' - but you understand how much more this is now a
'process' issue for Nike. What if I upload a picture of myself strangling a
picture of President Obama, and that T-Shirt is manufactured by Nike with their
logo and I wear it - they could be sued as a corporation for enticing race
hatered... Just because your website or internet or mobile campaign is
'interactive' does not make it Engagement Marketing. But Engagement Marketing
has to be interactive. So in a Venn Diagram, Engagement Marketing is a small
circle wholly inside the far bigger circle of Interactive Marketing. All
Engagement Marketing is Interactive but not all Interactive Marketing is Engagement
Marketing. One common misconception is now cleared.

VIRAL IS NOT SAME AS ENGAGEMENT

A second common mistake about Engagement Marketing is the confusion with Viral
Marketing. Yes, often a good, 'engaging' campaign can become viral - and in
most cases becoming viral is very good for a modern digital interactive
campaign - but being viral is not the same as Engagement Marketing. Why?
Co-creation. Engagement Marketing is not simply the process of echoing what the
brand sent out, even if one does to a wide 'community' through modern social
media means like Facebook, Twitter, etc. A great viral video can yes, help
promote the brand - look at Psy and Gangnam Style - but that is not
'co-creation'. Lets take this case and explore. If Psy allowed his fans to co-create
variations and versions of his music video - and help spread those - only then
would it become 'Engagement Marketing'. This is what for example another rap
artist Seeda of Japan did with his new album. Seeda created a sound-based
treasure hunt across Japan. Follow the trail to find Seeda's favorite places,
at every place you get Seeda tell in his own voice why that place is special,
and hear at that location one track from the new album. When the album was
finally released, it debuted at number 1.

So while often successful Engagement Marketing tends to have
viral elements and can go viral, not all viral campaigns are Engagement
Marketing. And its possible to have Engagement Marketing without any viral
element to it. Thus in a Venn Diagram, Viral is a big circle, partly
overlapping Engagement Marketing the smaller circle. Most of Engagement
Marketing is inside the Viral Marketing but not all. Most viral marketing is
not Engagement Marketing, but most Engagement Marketing does have Viral
elements in it. That is why it is easy to confuse the two.

ENGAGEMENT IS NOT SAME AS USER-GENERATED ADVERTISING

This is perhaps the most difficult part. We all know of
stories where passionate fans of some brands have gone to extraordinary lengths
to create original advertising or marketing or branding to their favorite
brand, from Harley Davidson motorcycle fans physically branding themselves with
Harley tattoos, to many Apple fans doing iPhone ad tributes onto YoutTube to
the guy who made furniture out of Fedex boxes (And was sued by Fedex for
damaging the brand, haha, what morons at Fedex)

User-Generated Advertising can be very compelling and deeply involving and
obviously very 'engaging' to that individual consumer or fan. It is not what
Engagement Marketing is all about, because the brand is not involved and
usually is wholly ignorant of this activity, until the video suddenly pops up
on YouTube. Remember the definition, Engagement Marketing is 'co-creation' of
the brand experience. Not User-generated, but 'co-created' both with the
consumer(s) and the brand.

ENGAGEMENT IS NOT PERSONALIZATION

And while very often Engagement Marketing results in the
personalization of the marketing experience ie to my model car, its color, etc
- that personalization is not by itself 'Engagement Marketing'. We have had
these abilities forever in marketing. Car makers - even in the time of Ford's
Model T - allowed us to customize our cars to at least some colors, and often
more premium cars offer wide ranges of colors, Aston Martin for example will
match the color of your Aston to any color you bring in. Personalization by
itself is not Engagement Marketing, but often Engagement Marketing does allow
us to personalize our experience. Only when the marketing itself allows our
co-creation, then it becomes Engagement Marketing. So for example Coca Cola in
Australia, which now allows consumers to order custom cans of Coca Cola with
your name spelled in the Coca Cola script on the side of the can - that is
Engagement Marketing. Why? Because the Coca Cola drink did not change, it was
the packaging - ie the marketing - the branding - which is now co-created.
Tomi-Cola with Coca Cola... Those
packages of the soft drink - the cans - are now co-created. This is definition
Engagement Marketing. When I bring a six-pack of Tomi-Cola to the party at my
friend's house, I am actively marketing Coke by co-branding it with my name.
That is Engagement Marketing using personalization. Not all personalization is
Engagement Marketing, but Engagement Marketing can be powerful if it includes
personalization.

SO THIS IS ENGAGEMENT MARKETING

So Engagement Marketing is the process of involving
consumers in the co-creation of brand experiences. Now that we know what is not
Engagement Marketing, lets start to look at a few famous examples to get clear
view of what it can be.

Co-Creation of Product Design. Lego invited some of its most
passionate fans as an experiment in 2005 to join together and design a new Lego
toy. The fans sat together, had all the manufactured Lego bricks at their
disposal, and created the ultimate Lego toy kit, a train engine they called the
Santa Fe. Lego launched the toy with its standard first-set run of 10,000 kits
and sold out in two weeks as the best new Lego toy launch in Lego history. This
brings us to the lesson Alan Moore regularly drills into the heads of his
audiences - we embrace what we create. When you have your fans co-create the
brand experience, they are involved, embedded in that process and will embrace
it. They will then go and tell the world how great that new thingamajig will
be, that they were involved with, to help it become a success. Note this
happened at the dawn of social media. Today with Facebook, Twitter etc, the
opportunity for fans to celebrate what they co-created will be far bigger
still. As we say on this blog, Communities Dominate Brands.

Now, not every industry can do this, have its consumers come in and start to
collaborate in product design, but did you know Boeing's 787 Dreamliner
included inputs from over 10,000 Boeing fans, non-aviation engineers, who
helped co-create the design. And Lays the potato chips has run the campaign now
successfully on several continents, inviting fans to make suggestions of the
new flavors - suggestions sent in of course via SMS text messages. Best flavor
suggestions voted, top 3 test-marketed and most successful of those will be
fully launched. The person who suggested the winning flavor earns 1% of every
Lays package of that flavor sold ever since. By the way, the idea was first run
in India and since done in South Africa and Guatemala in Latin America etc.

PROCESS IS NOT ONE AD

And lets understand Engagement Marketing at its heart. The world's first
company built from ground-up to run on Engagement Marketing principles, had by
happy coincidence Alan Moore as one of its Board Members advising them. It was
the innovative mobile service provider in the UK called Blyk, a few years ago.
Blyk got a lot of attention early, with some high-powered founders including
the ex-Nokia President Pekka Ala-Pietila who had been expected by many to be
named Jorma Ollila's successor back when Nokia was the mobile industry giant.
Blyk then seemed to vanish very suddenly and a lot of false stories spread
about how it ended. Blyk did not die in the UK market, it was so successful,
they were brought in by Orange one of the big 4 networks to run their in-house
mobile advertising and marketing as a platform provider. Meanwhile Blyk has
since expanded to many countries from the Netherlands to India repeating the
same successs they had in the UK.

The gimmick with Blyk was not that the youth could get free calls and free
messages in exchange of some ads. The gimmick with Blyk was Engagement
Marketing. By using Alan Moore's Engagement Marketing principles meticulously,
Blyk achieved the ultimate in advertising - and as the first mobile company to
do so - their process was so powerful, compelling, relevant and beloved, that their consumers requested more ads!

Go back to the survey I reported on the top. People hate ads
on TV so much, they buy TiVo and PVR boxes to be able to skip ads altogether.
And when some clueless advertisers run barrages of spam and banner ads and
interstitials and preroll video and force consumers to be interrupted on their phones
to be bombarded with ads, of course the consumers hate those mobile ads even
more than the TV ads.

Then compare to Blyk. Consumers 'love' ads? So much so, that they ASK for MORE
ads? Yes they do. This is no anomaly. We did the analysis here on this blog and with
support from the experts over at Forum Oxford, we found that Blyk ran over
2,600 individual mobile ad campaigns over a year for 200 of the topmost global
brands like Coca Cola, Ford, Mastercard, L'Oreal and Levi's. The average brand
loved the Blyk experience so much, they ran yes - on average 13 campaigns on
Blyk per year - more than one per month. That will not happen on any brand new
media unless it is highly - incredibly - unbelievably - unprecedentedly
successful.

Check this out. The average Blyk users - a youth user between ages 16 and 24 -
was bombarded by 6 marketing messages on average every day (they did not have
to consume them daily, they could take them whenever they wanted, that is part
of the beauty of mobile, we can cut the linear relationship between content and
its advertising. I can have my free Blyk call today and watch 6 ads on Saturday
to pay for it. This only works on mobile where our mobile phone numbers are as
near to unique and personal, as being the nearest thing to a global ID number.
In many parts of Africa, people will identify their house number by their
mobile phone number listed on the door, not the house number on a street where
the streets might not be named, and many people can't even read...)

So back to Blyk. You are bombarded by six mobile marketing messages per day.
How much will you hate that? Its 42 ads seen per week, 180 ads you have to
watch per month, every month, to get the modest free minutes and free messages
allowance from Blyk. How much did the youth hate these ads. After 2,600 ad
campaigns to 200,000 youth consumers in Britain, Blyk sustained an average
response rate of... 29% !!!!!

TWENTY NINE PERCENT

That is not twice as good as on the internet. Its not five times better. Its
not ten times better. Its about 100 times better response rates than we see on
banner ads on the internet! Yes, that is no misprint. 29% response rates - not
click-through rates mind you, even better, these are actively wanted
engagement, responding to an ad, often answering a question or poll or giving
an opinion. 29% response rate after 2,600 ad campaigns while the youth received
2,200 mobile marketing messages per year.

If I promise you 29% response rates on average (some easily above 45% if the
campaign was better designed and well targeted on a highly popular brand etc)
and the option is to do mobile banners that are hated and get in best cases
something like 3% or 4% click-through rates on mobile (still 10x better than
online, obviously) then WHY would you even consider the stupid banner ads. And
this.. and this before... (drumroll)

BIGGEST COMPLAINT BY USERS - WANT MORE ADS

I am not making this up. Jonathan 'JMac' MacDonald now known as the mobile
marketing guru and author, back in the day was 'just' an ex Ministry of Sound
music guy who had joined as Blyk's UK Sales VP. He said in 2008 that the
biggest complaint the Blyk calling center was getting from the 16-24 year old
users, the number 1 complaint was .. how can I get more ads? After bombarded by
over 2,200 ads per year, and voluntarily, willingly responding to 29% of those
- the youth users loved Blyk ads so much, they wanted MORE OF THEM? How is this
possible? This was built on Engagement Marketing principles. Now we will go
through the process, I show to you, how teenagers will become so in love with
Blyk mobile marketing messages, they will crave for more and will rush to open
them immediately. This is the how.

HOW TO DO ENGAGEMENT - BLYK'NAM STYLE

Imagine two girls, teenagers, 17 year olds. BFF's Best
Friends Forever. They like the same bands, eat the same foods, dress the same,
use the same colors in makeup. And they both have joined Blyk. One of the girls
is totally honest, tells Blyk everything she likes - fashion, makeup, rock
music. The other, thinks she'll 'game' the system, and not reveal all about
herself, and thinks she'd just like some makeup advice and coupons and tells
Blyk she only likes makeup.

So one of Blyk's advertisers, L'Oreal notices two girls with interests in
makeup and sends the first contact communciation, asking if they would like
more info from L'Oreal, and also - asks in an MMS message, showing some colors
of lips, asking which color of lipstick the girl favors.

MUST BE OPT-IN

One. Lets stop right here to start with. The reason any true Engagement
Marketing campaign can get 29% or 35% or 45% response rates is that Engagement
Marketing starts from the premise of 'Opt-in'. It has to be opt-in. There is no
spam in Engagement Marketing, ever. You have to ask for permission. This is a
painful step to many who prefer to shotgun their advertising via television or
other imprecise mass media channels, but the unique abilities of mobile start
with unique benefit number 1 - mobile is the first truly personal mass media
channel. So ask for permission. There cannot be Engagement Marketing without
opt-in. Learn this, internalize this, or be condemned to the scrapheap of
advertising history soon as an obsolete dinosaur. All Engagement Marketing is
opt-in based.

Lets return to the two girls. Blyk sends the MMS message with six pictures of
lips. Both girls respond the same way - they don't pick fiery red or pink or
dark maroon or natural, they pick black. These two 17 year old girls are what
is known as 'Goths'. Girls who dress in black-and-white, look anemic every day,
seem angry and depressed and listen to Gothic rock music like say, Finnish rock
band Nightwish.

Today L'Oreal has sent these two girls one MMS ad, got both to respond saying
yes they'd like more messages from L'Oreal, and both picked lipstick color of
black. The two girls will still need to see five more ads to fulfill today's
quota. L'Oreal accepts their responses - and now the magic starts to happen.
L'Oreal adjusts ALL of its future marketing messages to these two girls to only
feature black-and-white fashion images, in Gothic styles.

Two days later, the second message comes from L'Oreal to both girls. L'Oreal
asks which is the supermodel the two girls most admire. Again it is an MMS with
six pictures of fashion models that are under contract for L'Oreal. Note -
every one of the six models are pictured of course wearing black lipstick...
And the girls both have identical tastes, they both select the actress Eva
Longoria (from Desperate Housewives).

Two messages, and L'Oreal now adjusts all future marketing messages to always
use pictures of Eva Longoria, not the other 5 models, and always use Eva in
colors of extreme gothic Black-and-white.

After two iterations, the 'personal' marketing channel from L'Oreal to these
two girls has become far more representative of their personal tastes than
anything in any print magazine could ever be. Vogue, Cosmo, Elle or Seventeen in
print format could never, EVER have such highly targeted ads as L'Oreal can now
do for these two girls. And obviously, a class-mate of their who uses pink
lipstick and prefers Kate Moss will never see Eva Longoria in black, she will
get the same 'campaign' messages, but dressed up as Kate Moss in pinkish
tones... This is co-creation of marketing messages. This is the very heart of
Engagement Marketing. This is why in only a few steps, the marketing can become
highly appreciated and personal and beloved. And we haven't gotten to the good
part yet. Lets do message number 3.

BEGGING FOR MORE ADS

L'Oreal has measured its Blyk user base and found that there are a lot of goths
in its opt-in database. And the clever marketing department execs at L'Oreal
dig into their consumer insights and notice that yes, the Goths seem to like
the Finnish rock band Nightwish. And so, when Nightwish does its next tour of
Europe, L'Oreal decides to sponsor the tour. And as sponsor, it gets 200
tickets to the opening show at Earl's Court in London. L'Oreal decides to
reward its fans on Blyk.

L'Oreal digs through the Blyk database and its opt-in users, and finds all
those L'Oreal opt-in fans who selected black as their lipstick color (are
likely Goths) and who also said they like rock music. And finds 2,000 such
teens in the system. L'Oreal sends a surprise message just to these 2,000 lucky
ones with an MMS message with Nightwish doing a short snippet of its latest
music video - and promises L'Oreal treats the first 200 of its Gothic rock fans
to free tickets of Nightwish at Earl's Court.

Girl 1 gets this message, opens it, watches the video in deep entrhallment -
remember both girls love Nightwish, how could L'Oreal know that this is their
fave band? - and after the videoclip embedded in the MMS, L'Oreal offers the
fastest to respond, FREE tickets to the opening night? The girl sends her
response immediately.

Notice what happens. The system learns ever more accurately what we want, and
then feeds us what we'd most prefer, and teaches us to react immediately, to
open the messages and respond fast. Pretty clever eh?

Now. If you are truly a fan of Nightwish and Eva Longoria and dress in black,
and your makeup brand has started to communicate with you using your fave
colors (black) and using your fave actress (Eva) and now gives you the chance
to win free tickets just by responding fast - you will LOVE this brand more
than anything you could imagine. The girl does not have to win the ticket today
to love L'Oreal for it.

What of her friend? They were both sitting at Pizza Hut. The BFF sees this
message coming on Blyk from L'Oreal with the Nightwish video clip. They both
watch it on the friends' phone, but this other girl is still waiting. The other
girl has already sent in her response to try to be among the fastest 200 to
win, but the best friend has not received this offer! Why not? She becomes
despondent. She calls up Blyk demanding her offer too.

Blyk tells her, that because she did not tell Blyk - and L'Oreal - that she
likes rock music, she will never be bothered with anything about rock music.
After all, she might prefer rap music or country music or jazz for all they
know. They will only send rock music ticket offers to those members who said
they like rock music. That this girl tried to 'game the system' by witholding
real opinions from Blyk will only harm her, not benefit her. She adjusts her
setting immediately and is served the L'Oreal offer within seconds thereafter.
She learns her lesson the hard way as her friend gets to go to the concert on
the ultimate free ticket...

This is truly textbook Engagement Marketing. Co-creation of the marketing communications
between the brand and the consumer. When we analyzed the Blyk traffic together
with Forum Oxford, we found that the average Blyk campaign had about 6 ot 7 of
these interactive steps back-and-forth, run for about a week or ten days, with
then about two weeks of silence, until the next such campaign ran again.

29% response rates. Consumers loving the ads so much, they beg for more. 2,600
such campaigns run by 200 of the biggest global brands in England just over one
year, loving it so much they ran on average 13 such campaigns per year. Why are
you not using Engagement Marketing today?

This is not a UK specific anomaly. The Blyk model has been successfully copied
from Croatia to Malaysia. Alcatel-Lucent's Optism runs on these principles.
OutThereMedia runs its opt-in mobile marketing on these principles. Blyk has a
million audience just in India alone, on these very same principles. Once you
go Engagement Marketing, you never go back.

E = M 2 C

That is how engagement marketing can be done today. Now lets go into the
future. What if you have your fans help co-create your brand, participate in it
and help decorate the most popular teen fashion magazine for girls? Lets
examine Girlswalker, ie Tokyo Girl of Japan. This is where engagement marketing
can bring you.

TOKYO GIRL

Girlswalker starts off as a standard teenage fashion magazine for girls. It
gives advice on what to wear, makeup and of course, how to pick up the boys,
make relationships last etc.. Rather than the print magazine out perhaps once
per month, Girlswalker has two issues per week. They are smaller in content,
formated for the small screens of the mobile phone and have fewer articles per
issue. But over a month, you get about the same amount of magazine content as
you might on Glamour or Vogue or Seventeen or whatever is your fashion magazine
of choice. But rather than the paid paper-based print edition, Girlswalker
comes to the favorite device of the teens - their mobile phones - and is
totally free. We are right off with something better.

Then the content. There are normal teen-magazine articles
written by professional journalists. And there is plenty of make-up and fashion
dressing advice. Except.. that the pictures of the models in Girlswalker are
all genuine Tokyo girls, shot on the streets of the most fashionable steets of
Tokyo. Quite literally this fashion mobile magazine is up-to-date, it shows
this week what real Tokyo teenage girls are wearing this week (twice per week).
There are no supermodels featured in Girlswalker, only genuine Tokyo teens.

And the next point, while yes, the audience of Girlswalker includes of course,
the Tokyo teens, its target audience is.. the rest of Japanese teenage girls
who don't live in Tokyo. The girls in Osaka and Kyoto and Sapporo and any towns,
villages and rice farms along the way. The girls who would want to be as cool
and sexy and glamorous as the Tokyo girls.

So? To pay for the free mobile internet based magazine, how do you monetize it?
Two ways. You have the freemium content which more than pays for the
publication. About 10% of the teens pay about 2 dollars per month for the
premium edition. It enhances the standard free content with longer articles,
more pictures and of course.. videos. If the free magazine offers ten tips to
keep your romance hot, on the premium edition you get 20 tips, etc. And then there is the super-VIP edition,
which includes all the premium content but adds super benefits such as free
access to the twice-annual fashion shows with the hottest new fashions modelled
on the catwalk by, not supermodels, but rather, yes, the hottest girls from the
pages of Girlswalker.

Now the kicker. The advertising. Tokyo Girl advertising is relevant and
personal to the tastes of the reader and highly appealing. What happens? Alan
Moore reported in his book No Straight Lines, that Girlswalker ads achieve, on
average.... (wait for it...) ... 45% redemption rates! Not 'click-through rates' or even 'response rates' but 'redemption rates' - actual money purchases generated per ad view! 45% redemption rates? That is the holy grail of advertising! We know exactly which ad generated what sales and nearly half of the targeted (obviously already opt-in) ads get nearly half to produce sales? You, the CMO of your Fortune 500 corporation stop all TV, radio, print and other ads instantly when you see this number. Gosh. Yes, if 10,000 girls saw
that one blouse advertized by Zara in this week's issue, then 4,500 blouses
were sold directly from that ad! Who gets 45% redemption rates? This utterly
obliterates the 'efficiency' of shotgun advertising such as TV ads. For every
100 ads seen, 45 actual paid purchases result ! This utterly remakes the total
print industry - and ad industry, it goes without saying.

Girlswalker ad rates have skyrocketed and today an ad in the current issue
costs more than an ad on television in prime time in Japan. And how is this
possible? Each issue has only a few ad slots and they are auctioned to the
highest bidder, of course... As a consequence, Girlswalker the media empire is
ridiculously profitable.

And let me just mention where does this all go 'next' - now Tokyo Girl has its twice-annual fashion shows - so immensely popular (only to Platinum level members) they are booking sports arenas that get filled by teenage girls. And the mobile commerce involved? Get this - when the girl in the audience likes something the Tokyo Girl walking on the catwalk is wearing, she only points her phone at the model on the catwalk, and selects which item from the girl she wants (the skirt, the shoes, the handbag, whatever) and clicks to buy. The system already knows this users size so no other info is needed. Point-to-buy convenience - at a fashion show! Truly to be first in your neighborhood to wear the latest fashions, just like a proper Tokyo Girl. Wow. This is the future of retail. (oh, and the magic in point-and-buy tech? Its not location-based, its time-based. They just know which model is currently on the catwalk, you could point your cameraphone at the toilets, and it will still offer you that Hennes & Mauritz silk scarf in pink and silver... :-)

WHILE IN CANADA

And I just read only the headline finding from Canada, from Coca Cola's latest
campaign. They ran a global campaign across many media, TV, print, web and
mobile. They had several mobile elements to it from QR Codes to mobile web to
smartphone apps, but at the epicenter of the campaign was SMS text messaging
and a deeply engaging advertising concept. The result? 45% of the target
audience responded and engaged with the campaign ! It can be done, not just in
Japan but if even the usually laggard Canada (which has yet to even pass 100%
mobile phone penetration rates, where several countries have already passed
200%) can do it, you can do it in your country.

SO ITS LOCATION?

So whereas Engagement Marketing was the first totally new advertising concept
native to mobile (earlier mobile ads were all copies of previous media, such as
banner ads, spam emails and location-based ads.) You thought Location-based ads
- like say FourSquare - are new? Far from it. LBS ads were invented for the
third mass media - Cinema, yes Cinema has had those 'near this cinema' type of
restaurant ads for nearly a century now. And their success is a good precursor
to how poorly LBS is performing today. A Nielsen survey in December 2012 found
that 10 million Americans are active users of FourSquare. While 10 million
looks like a big number for many in other media like print, 10 million is
peanuts in mobile. Thats only 3% of American cellphone owners! Thats nothing.
Don't focus on Location, its a red herring. Focus on the 9 unique aspects of
mobile to build your market success.

THE NINE UNIQUE ASPECTS OF MOBILE AS A MASS MEDIA CHANNEL
1 - Mobile is personal

When the first TV ad was developed, it was a Bulova watch ad
in the USA. It was like a newspaper ad, lifted from the print issue and
broadcast to the television screen. Yes, imagine a TV camera showing 30 seconds of a still image newspaper or magazine ad. It was a still image. An announcer read a voice-over of the
exact print copy seen on the black-and-white still image on the TV screen "America runs on Bulova time." Even the second-hand on the clock on the picture did not move. A still picture was broadcast for 30 seconds with what sounded like a radio announcer reading the same text that was displayed on the TV screen. BORING !!! That was it. No jingles, no
moving images, no smiling kids or happy dogs. And no drama, no comedy, no action,
no emotional involvement. That was not using the abilites of television and
such an ad would be camp if run today. I find a similarity to most mobile ad
campaigns or mobile elements to cross-media campaigns. They only copy older
less-efficient media, so mobile is severely underperforming. Use those nine
unique benefits to deliver better advertising performance than was possible
before mobile became the 7th mass media.

NEXT COMES AUGMENTED REALITY

Which brings me to the future. Augmented Reality, ie AR. I have been exploring
the use of AR as a unique ability of mobile, but today AR is spreading past
mobile, to tablet PCs, to Playstation Portables, and very shortly, to
goggles/glasses such as Google's Project Glass ie the Google Goggles. AR was
immediately embraced by advertising, from the iconic first Ford Ka ads in
Europe to the Ikea catalog made available via AR (So you can virtually test
furniture in your home, just by looking at the item through your cameraphone
viewer aiming the furniture to any room in your home).

AR is inherently interactive and very easily becomes fully engaging too. The
Ford Ka ads four years ago were famous for having live people step into the
camera view, to be pictured next to the virtual Ford Ka which did not exist in
reality, at that point. AR invites people to want to participate. A French
website, DirectOptic, has added AR based virtual trials to selling their
sunglasses and eyeglasses, to enormous gains. The visitors to the website who
use the AR feature have a 41% higher conversion rate than visitors who do not.
And the buyers who make a purchase and who used AR will spend 12.5% more than
those who didn't. So the total gains to DirectOptic from using AR are 45.6%
more revenues from the AR users.

Oh, if you don't really know or understand AR the 8th Mass Media (mobile was 7th, internet was 6th, TV was 5th) or perhaps doubt it can be a viable ad medium etc, you might want to watch my TEDx Talk about Augmented Reality last year. Its like all TED videos, short and snappy, and I have tons of AR media examples in it. See the video at Tomi Ahonen TEDx Talk About Augmented Reality.

OBAMA 2012

Then Senator Barack Obama Presidential campaign in 2008, run by David Axelrod,
set new standards for using mobile in US elections, from announcing his VP
choice by SMS, to the innovative Obama app for the iPhone. In 2012 his
re-election campaign run by Jim Messina turbocharged all they had learned, from
getting donations directly by one click via SMS to this, perhaps the ultimate
'force multiplier' in the history of elections.

Obama's campaign had used digital and social media very effectively and had for
example recruited 311,000 volunteers for election day (compared to 34,000 that
Mitt Romney's campaign had recruited). Messina had assigned 200,000 volunteers
to phone duty on election day, who placed 11 million phone calls to voters.

Lets explore this a bit. Obama's total vote total was 65 million, so about one
in six Obama voters received a phone call on election day to remind them to
vote, and remember, 29% had already voted before that day. The campaign knew
who were true Obama supporters - they didn't robocall districts without focus,
and didn't hit Romney supporters. So only 46 million Obama supporters voted
actually on election day, and thus, the campaign reached nearly one in four who
voted that day. (They also made another 6 million personal visits knocking on
doors on election day, and used obviously all other activation methods from
Facebook and Twitter reminders to more traditiona emails and mailers). But here
is the sweetest part.

As the Obama 2012 campaign had gone through the trouble to
collect mobile phone numbers and permissions - and personal info into a monster
database called Narwhal. They had permissions. They had the mobile numbers. And
they knew who was a nurse, who was a retired Marine Master Sergeant and who was
still a student at the local community college etc. Plus they knew who had
voted and who had already been contacted personally on election day. So they
built the ultimate engagement campaign.

Every registered Obama supporter with a mobile phone who had given permission,
received an SMS text message early on Tuesday election day with one question:
'Would you be willing to make one call to an undecided voter, on behalf of
President Obama today?' Remember the campaign already knew this person was an
Obama supporter and that this person had already voted that day or before. Now
they were not asking for money - at that point the campaign was awash with
cash, they needed volunteers to 'turn out the vote'. And if the same ratio of
support for this SMS campaign occurred as they reported for their Facebook
campaign (they didn't reveal the SMS campaign effectiveness, which I believe
was far stronger, but lets use the FB stat as the reference) then of the 24
million Obama voters who said they had been contacted by the campaign (by voter
polls after the election) if we assign the 8% rate of activation as on FB, it
means 1.9 million bonus volunteers made an extra phone call on behalf of
President Obama on election day.

So the campaign, by sending out 24 million SMS text messages at perhaps 2.4
million dollar total cost, achieved 1.9 million more calls, in addition to the
11 million their army of volunteers produced. And for contrast, the Romney
campaign volunteers didn't even try personal calls, they only made Robocalls
(Recordings, like Donald Trump endorsing Romney and encouraging people to vote
for Romney). The Romney campaign made a total of 6 million Robocalls on
election day, of which only 3.1 million hit Republican voters who had not yet
voted on that day. Obama's SMS based mobile gimmick did more than half that
level - with personal calls, a laid-off factory worker calling another factory
worker, a teacher calling a teacher, a retired housewife calling another
retired housewife, etc. This is the very essense of Engagement Marketing,
performed to brilliance by the Obama campaign. I expect when the final analysis
is done and reported, the SMS-volunteering 'would you make one call for the
President' message will go down as one of the most cost-effective election day
activation methods ever devised. But it required permission, careful engagement
over time - the average Obama supporter had been personally contacted 5 times
during the 2012 election season, by personal visits to the home or personal
phone calls, in addition to countless SMS text messages, emails, Facebook and
Twitter contacts, YouTube viral videos etc. (and for those who want to see the inside scoop on Obama's data mining edge and all the numbers of the Narwhal vs Orca battle of voting databases in 2012, my full stats and analysis is here)

That is how you build an Engagement Campaign, and how you use it. Remember what
Alan Moore teaches, people embrace what they create. Let your consumers
co-create your marketing experience with you.

So when you consider your next campaign with mobile, lets
take the lessons from Alan Moore, Jonathan MacDonald and Agustin Calvo, from
examples pioneered by Lego, Seeda, Lays Potato Chips, Blyk, L'Oreal,
Girlswalker, Ford, Coca Cola and the Obama Campaign. Don't just interrupt your
audience, respect them and ask for permission. When you do create your mobile
marketing, do make it interactive and viral, of course, but make it also
engaging. Remember Agustin Calvo's formula, Engagement = Mobile To Community. E
= M2C.

WHERE NEXT?

So yeah, obviously if you want or need, I do these kinds of
workshops all around the world for my clients and I'd be delighted to prepare a
workshop or seminar for you about Engagement Marketing and/or other mobile
media, mobile advertising, viral marketing, mobile money, Augmented Reality
etc. While I'm not a mobile advertising specialist, I did chair the world's first conference on mobile advertising 13 years ago, I was the first author to discuss mobile marketing at chapter-length in a book, each of my twelve bestsellers includes mobile advertising and one of my books was completely focused on this aspect of the mobile industry. Yes, I am regularly used by big ad agencies, national advertising associations etc to run workshops and do seminars, but seriously, I am an expert on the mobile industry overall, that covers anything from youth messaging to farming irrigation systems, from mobile money to smartphones, from mobile gaming to international voice call roaming, and from MVNO profits to SIM card loyalties. I am not your expert on mAd as in Mobile Advertising. So this is not about me. Who are your best resources whose day job is purely mAd and who are my gurus into this specialist area that is one of the fastest-evolving ever seen in media history.

If you want to really learn Engagement Marketing there can
only be one man for that, its the guy who invented the concept and has thought
about this the longest and done it the most, and that is Alan Moore the CEO of
SMLXL out of Cambridge UK.

But there are several superb experts and gurus who have mastered Engagement
Marketing and who do it in their daily work and are excellent guides for you. I
am not an advertising dude myself, so I don't know all who now are the best at
this craft, but here are my favorites who do know what they are doing and would
be excellent guides for you on your journey from interactive digital marketing
to Engagement Marketing. There is JMac, Jonathan MacDonald, of course, the
author and guru from Britain. There is Agustin Calvo the author and former
mobile ad agency CEO from Spain. Then I'd add the American, Kim Dushinski, the
author of the wonderful Mobile Marketing Handbook (now in its Second Edition,
make sure you buy the new version, not the first edition). I have to add my
first guru into the world of advertising and mobile merging, the Finnish grand
old man of digital media, Antti Ohrling. We also have to remember Kerstin
Trikalitis of Out There Media who is very active here in Asia, and the author Peggy
Anne Salz of Mobile Groove, based out of Germany. And I'd be remiss to ignore
my dear friend Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy in Britain or another dear friend, author
Russell Buckley, the past CEO of the MMA previously with Google and Admob who
lives in Germany. Lastly I'd add Richard Ting of R/GA out of New York. I know
there are at least a dozen more truly world-class experts in Engagement
Marketing, but these are people I know, whose work and writing I follow, who
are behind award-winning concepts and campaigns, who really know what is
Engagement Marketing and what only pretends to be that.

ABOUT YOUR CAREER

Let me end with a different view. I know for some who have
an illustrious career in advertising and a wall full of awards, the concept of
yet another digital miracle cure to advertising may seem like all hype and no
hope, and a massive intrusion into the world they know and have mastered.
Nobody taught this Engagement Stuff at university, and isn't it just a tired
old refrain of what we learned with the internet or now see in social media?
There is an inbuilt resistance to all things new, and even more, one that might
threaten the livelihood, and one where older experts seem out of touch and the
youngest in the industry seem more knowledgable. A lot of veterans in the
advertising industry - including often the bosses - will resist the change.

The worse problem is television. Currently the ad industry
global awards are all TV oriented. The money in the advertising industry is
disproportionately geared to television where ad deals often get a percentage
cut of TV ads placed, and that is big money. If you go to your ad agency and
ask for a cross-platform campaign, they will always pitch TV in it, whether TV
really works or not. And just watch what happens if you, the client, announce
that you want the other parts but lets not do TV this time? The best team will
not work on your campaign! The best teams want the TV stuff, because thats the
fame and glory bit, thats how you win your awards and perhaps get to go to
Cannes etc.

The problem is, of course, that TV viewing is not increasing anymore, it has
plateaued. TV ads are seeing ever less efficacy, due to TiVo and other PVRs and
consumers viewing content in other ways to avoid the ads altogether. That
means, the most attractive audiences are increasingly avoiding the ads, and
ever less attractive parts of the TV viewing audience - like the poorest
segments in that country - are left to aim ads at.

Meanwhile, the disparity with our media use of mobile is totally out of
proportion to the miniscule ad spend on the media so far. And most of that ad
spend is the pointless spam messages and annoying banner ads and interstitials
etc. So many ad execs will point to the unfulfilled promise - arguably
disappointment - of mobile ads, and go again to work on the next TV ad
campaign. Contrast that with successful mobile ad campaigns. A well designed,
opt-in, engagement marketing campaign will be delivering well in excess of 25%
response rates and usually well above 30% rates, in any country, from England
to Egypt, from Croatia to Canada, from Spain to Singapore, from South Africa to
South Korea.

Some creative types at ad agencies will 'get it' that as the mobile is the most
personal, most sensitive and private media channel, and the screen space is so
limited, and our attention span to the medium is often divided - we multitask
often when we consume mobile media - the challenges to creating a successful mobile
ad campaign are far greater than doing that on a magazine or billboard or radio
or TV. The challenges are greater on mobile than on the web. The challenges are
greater, the rewards are potentially huge. For any truly creative mind, this is
the best kind of opportunity. A new media channel with massive reach and
enormous potential, that most rival creatives do not fully understand! This is
where careers are made.

I think there will be primarily two types of advertising professionals this
decade, those who embrace mobile with a passion, putting it dead-center into
everything; and those who resist 'the dark side' and try to remain with the
more familar legacy mass media - which yes, today, includes the web. Yes, the
internet is now a legacy mass media that is no longer the cutting edge of new
and cool. Where would you rather be? Which brings me to a few closing thoughts.
Google, the world's biggest internet company and world's largest web
advertising company has been saying for years, that mobile is the future of the
internet.

MOBILE MOVES TO MIDDLE

Ford was the first major advertiser to commit to making mobile part of every
campaign they run across any media. Coca Cola now puts mobile to the center of
their campaigns. Visa goes even further, saying mobile is the future of
payments too! And Kraft the US food giant gives its simple mobile philosphy,
'Leave no phone behind' when they advise their partners and audiences that any
mobile ad campaign should start from SMS and then build out from that with MMS,
QR, mobile web, etc long before you bother with such tiny niche audiences as
individual smartphone platform apps. Coca Cola puts it in their inimitable way,
with their famous 70:20:10 rule, put 70% of your mobile budget to mobile
messaging, only 20% to mobile web, and 10% to all others including smartphone
apps, Augmented Reality, etc.

Thats my primer on Engagement Marketing. I would be very interested to hear
your thoughts (and please, I know many of my readers obsess about the
smartphone races, this comment thread is closed to smartphone discussions, I
will only allow discussion about advertising and marketing here, not the usual
iPhone vs Android debates or what becomes of Nokia next). And if you want to see how we are now using mobile in media, advertising and retail, you might enjoy my video in Rotterdam at the end of the year when I gave a keynote to the Emerce Day about Mobile and eBusiness.

December 19, 2012

The nice thing with a strongly-growing giant industry is, that all the numbers keep growing, eh? The unfortunate side effect is, that almost any number you bother to memorize, becomes obsolete within months... But lets do this again. All major mobile numbers, now updates for End of Year 2012:

This is the big number. Update all your slides, we now are at 6.7 Billion active mobile phone 'subscriptions'. Obviously that is not in reality 94% of humans, as many of us have two phones or even three or more cellular connections (two smartphones and a tablet PC for example) and in many especially Emerging World markets, it is quite common to get prepaid SIM cards on every major network, and then do the 'SIM-card-switch' between the networks depending on who to call or send a message to.

But yes, the 'Mobile Moment' is nearly upon us, as I said, that will come in 2013, when there will be as many active mobile phone subscriptions as human beings alive (this of course includes contract based 'post-paid' accounts and 'pre-paid' SIM cards, and the uses of cellular subscriptions for other non-human uses like Machine-to-Machine and the 3G cellular connectivity of our data dongles and datacards and our tablets and netbooks, all added together).

The mobile industry added about 700 million new paying mobile subscriptions/accounts/SIM cards this year. The growth in mobile alone is about three times the installed base of all tablet PCs including iPads and all its rivals, combined. The growth alone, three times the installed base of tablets. Lets not pretend the tablets PC market is anything more than a niche, a nice healthy niche for PC makers, but tablets still don't even sell as many as laptops annually... smartphones alone, ignoring all other mobile phones 'featurephones' that mostly also have full HTML web browsers, yes, just counting smartphoes alone, they outsell tablets this year by roughly speaking 10 to 1.

6.7 Billion mobile phone users (allowing for overlap). There has never ever EVER been any industry as widely spread as mobile is today - and it grew 11% this year by paying customers. This industry is viciously profitable - the most profitable company on the planet used to call itself a PC company, 'Apple Computer' but now just calls itself a 'mobile' company. The wealthiest man on the planet is no longer Bill Gates of the PC industry, it is Carlos Slim the boss of America Movil the massive mobile empire across Latin America and now expanding into Europe.

4.3B UNIQUES

So then lets dig into the numbers. 6.7 Billion is the aggregate number of mobile subscriptions, when we allow for multiple subscriptions. How many unique mobile phone users are there in the planet. The 'real' count of our market, when duplicates are removed? It is now up to 4.3 Billion unique humans. Yes, 61% of the planet's population, no mathematical cheating, six out of ten humans on the planet does have a mobile phone in their pocket, connected to a mobile network. So 2.4 Billion of all mobile phone subscriptions in use, are duplicates, second, third and even fourth or fifth accounts for those unique users. 36% of all active mobile acccounts now are redundant connections for us, above and beyond our primary mobile connection.

Or to put it in a more meaninful way, it means, mathematically that the average mobile phone user today globally, has 1.56 accounts or SIM cards. Yes, this was a mystery to our American cousins still very recently but the phenomenon that I first discovered out of Finland and has happened in every country that passes the 60% penetration level, we do see it in most countries now. More than 100 countries have passed 100% penetration level. The United States joined this club last year, Taiwan and Hong Kong passed the 100% penetration level eleven years ago, Finland, Singapore and Italy did it ten years ago. The UAE was the first country to report mobile subscriptions passing 200% and now several countries are joining that group such as Hong Kong, Panama and Macao, with Saudi Arabia just on the brink.

5.3 BILLION MOBILE HANDSETS

And somewhere between the absolute ceiling of total active subscriptions, and above the floor of unique users, lies the number of total mobile phone handsets in use. My consultancy has also provided this number since it was first measured, and reports now that for 2012 the number is .. 5.3 Billion total handsets in use globally. So 4.3 Billion unique mobile users, walk around with 5.3 Billion phones. That means, the average mobile phone user has 1.23 handsets (think iPhone user who also has a Blackberry from work). And as each of the 5.3 Billion handsets does have a connection, the excess 'SIM card only' population of 'second and third accounts' is thus 1.4 Billion or 21% of all active mobile accounts are 'only SIM cards' without a regularly associated handset (used temporarily in a handset that is more used by another network). Yes, one in five mobile phone accounts are 'purely promiscuous' customers, you can understand the mobile operators/carriers are increasingly frustrated with their loyalty programs and attempting to identify who are the loyal customers and who are promiscuous...

1.3 BILLION SMARTPHONES

So then the hot story in mobile for the past few years, our smartphone addiction. You would be forgiven for thinking every phone by now is a smartphone, yet the numbers, while showing enormous growth, indicate that only 1.3 Billion smartphones are in use today. That is 25% of all handsets in use worldwide. Yes, you read that correctly. Globally speaking, three quarters of all people who use a mobile phone, does NOT have a smartphone, not an iPhone, not a Galaxy or Blackberry or Lumia. No, three out of four humans using a mobile phone, uses a 'dumbphone' - many of which have good cameras, large color touch-screens and full HTML internet browsers, and can download Java games including Angry Birds, but are not smartphones. The smartphone population grew enormously in the past year but is only at 1.3 Billion worldwide.

1.3 BILLION CONNECT VIA 3G VS 1.1B VIA WIFI

The connectivity of our handsets and data devices is still more driven by cellular than wireless. 3G and faster cellular networks account for 1.3 Billion total global mobile connections ie 19% of all subscriptions, and WiFi is used by 1.1 Billion or 16%. As a percentage of handsets in use, 25% of all handsets now connect to 3G or faster cellular networks (note, a far higher percentage of the phones are capable of 3G connectivity, but the network operators/carriers have not all yet deployed 3G to all regions and many consumers have not upgraded to the data plans that 3G network services often require). WiFi meanwhile is used by 21% of all handsets in use globally. I might add, that the 'traffic' measured via WiFi is vastly greater than that through 3G, as most 3G plans are metered or have usage limits, but WiFi tends to be 'all you can eat' so often the heaviest usage is done in free WiFi hotspots. Don't confuse usage measurements with user measurements.

5.6 BILLION USE SMS TEXTING

And for those who were spreading words of doom and the end of SMS, we have news. Predictable news. SMS text messaging total global user base grew again last year. Up now to 5.6 Billion total users, up 11% from last year. What's with Whatsapp and iMessage and Blackberry Messenger and Facebook and Skype messengers? They all have only a fraction of the smartphone and 3G/WiFi user number, all of those have well under 1 Billion mobile users today, and are not cross-service usable. You have to join a given messaging service, and get your friends to join the same one. But SMS works on all phones. That is why the very latest measured user data from smartphone users in the USA, UK etc, tell us that the vast overwhelming majority of smartphone users with one or more of those messaging platforms - still continues to use SMS text messaging.

Make no mistake, the heaviest users of SMS have shifted most of their heavy messaging traffic away from SMS to the more efficient msssaging platforms. Several countries report a decline in total SMS traffic this year for the first time. But globally, the number of SMS users, the total number of messages sent, and the revenues earned by SMS still all grew in 2012. Yes, SMS total user base grew by 11% this year. In almost any other industry, if you grew 11% in one year you'd have a highlight year of huge bonuses. Imagine airlines or hotels or the cola drinks or shampoo or ice cream industry, they don't grow 11% per year in new users. SMS text messaging did, in 2012. Yet there are 'pundits' and 'experts' who write about the death to SMS. Haha. That may be coming. But its not here yet. Not this year and not in 2013 either...

VOICE CALLS ON MOBILE 5.4 BILLION USERS

Globally, as a percentage of all subscriptions, SMS is the most used mobile service (yes, used more than voice calls) and used by 83% of the mobile phone subscribers. Voice calls come in second, at 5.4 Billion users and 81% of all mobile users. So don't make the mistake of calling it anymore a 'mobile phone' or 'cellphone' - it is no longer primarily a 'portable telephone' - our mobile today, globally, is first and foremost a messaging device, with voice calls a highly used optional extra.. Call it a 'mobile' but not a 'mobile phone'. And yes, you read that correctly. Out of all mobile subscriptions active on the planet, for 19% there is no use for voice calls at all. Some of these are data connections to our laptops, some are 'M2M' Machine-to-Machine connections like our smart electric meters or the irrigation systems operated by SMS like used in India etc. And many more, are mobile handset users, who don't need voice, at least, not traditional cellular voice (they may well use Skype occasionally, but not traditional mobile/cellular voice). But they do use SMS text messaging and other features on the phone..

CAMERA USED BY 72%

The camera on a mobile phone is now used by 4.8 Billion people worldwide. Understand this for context - out of all people who have ever used any kind of camera in their lifetimes, for 12 out of 13 persons who ever used a camera, the only type of camera they ever used, was that on a cameraphone. Not the traditional stand-alone Canons, Nikons, Olympuses etc. Yes, for 12 out of 13 persons on the planet who ever took even one picture, the only camera they every used, was some kind of cameraphone camera. Don't tell me the cameraphone is a toy. Only one person in 13 who has taken pictures, has ever used a 'stand alone' camera either digital or film-based, and most of those will also take at least some pictures on their smartphones too... Oh, and lets look at per capita globally? Two thirds of the planet now have a cameraphone in their pockets, yes 68% penetration rate of cameraphones per capita, across the planet.

The planet has 1.6 Billion personal computers (this includes tablet PCs) - each with a screen. The world has 2 Billion television sets, each with a screen. Toss in 250 million portable gaming devices with a screen. And call it 300 million digital cameras with a screen. Thats under 4.2 Billion electronic devices that have a screen, in most cases, a color screen. And in our pockets, we have 4.8 Billion cameraphones, each with a color screen. Wow. For the planet, the mobile is 'the first screen' so to speak...

4 BILLION RECEIVED ADS IN THEIR POCKET THIS YEAR

And the world's largest advertsing platform and media is... no longer radio. It is now mobile! Yes, in 2012, 4.0 Billion people - a whole 60% of all mobile subscribers - and 56% of human beings alive - have received advertsing on their phones. How can that be if smartphones are only used 1.3 Billion and even web-browsers are used by 2.1 Billion (which has mostly overlap with those smartphones)? Its because the world's most widely used advertising format is.. SMS text messaging, of course. And number 2? Is not web banner ads, is MMS picture messaging (or more correctly, as MMS can do videos, sounds, long texts, web links and pictures, it is as the name is called, Multimedia Messaging Service). Even ringback tones have hundreds of millions of advertising audiences. So don't think that mobile ads are only with your gaming apps and banner ads and pre-roll video interruptions. Most humans who received ads on their phones this year, did so via SMS and MMS, not apps or the web banners...

MMS HAS 2.9 BILLION ACTIVE USERS

And then lets go to MMS. If you liked SMS and are a media brand or advertiser or consumer oriented company, you will love MMS. MMS can be used, yes to send pictures from one phone to another - but is a clumsy and costly and unreliable way to do that. Better ways exist especially for all who have data plans and smartphones and good mobile web services or social networking and picture sharing services. Not all mobile phone users have that, some use MMS yes, just to send a few pictures to their family and friends. Grandparents for example sending pictures of the cool Aston Martin they saw parked on the street that they know the 9 year old grandson would love to see. That is not the main market for MMS and where its growth and market is.

MMS is a multimedia platform. It is perfectly suited for news, entertainment, video, audio, pictures, long text messages, weblinks, QR codes, and yes, advertising. For delivering amazing, highly beloved, widely distributed, highly personal, relevant and timely advertising. Where good ad campaigns get routinely above 25% response rates !!! Routinely !!! Not the pathetic and hated banner ads that on mobile might yield you 4% click-through rates (and mind you, even the hated banner ads on mobile - do 10x better than their online cousins the banner ads do on the web).

MMS is the ultimate 'Engagement Marketing' platform and countless mobile ad players from Blyk to OutThereMedia to Optism to Qustodian know this and use MMS to its fullest power. If you are in media or any consumer-oriented business and are ignoring the digital interactive platform that has more active users than the global internet.. 50% more users than the total number of television sets on the planet - you do so at your own peril. Don't expect to remain employed till the end of this decade, however. 43% of all mobile phone subscribers are using MMS, globally. The 2.9 Billion total MMS user base is more astonishingly 41% of all human beings alive! MMS is the most wide-reaching multimedia platform on the planet.

2.3 BILLION CONSUME NEWS ON MOBILE

Why was it that the Associated Press Managing Editors' Conference concluded about a year ago, that the future of news is not the internet, it is mobile? And why they say that while newspapers were unable to monetize the internet, they are able to do so on mobile? Because of the numbers. The total number of mobile phone subscribers who consume news on their phones is now 34%. Or yes, 2.3 Billion people almost one in three humans alive (remember, this is all humans, counting from babies to great-grandparents) yes, 32% of all humans alive now consume news on their mobiles. Newspapers now send tomorrow's headlines today via MMS and SMS as premium services to their readers. You don't have even to be literate to get news on mobile, voice based news services are very popular in many countries, serving multiple language groups, on premium voice channels as subscription services. And yes, to put it in context these are PAID news users, 2.3 Billion on mobile. Compare to total paid subscription TV services (all formats, entertainment, movies, music, news, etc) of about 1 Billion or total newspaper circulations worlwide of only 430 million. But 2.3 Billion pay to get news on their mobiles. No wonder the Associated Press says the future of news is mobile.

So then the big internet number? The world has 2.5 Billion internet users now at the end of 2012. And look at that number - 2.1 Billion access browser-based internet content on a mobile handset! Yes, that includes the crude basic WAP browsers, that still populate very low-cost and old hand-me-down second hand phones many use in Africa and India etc. But yes, out of all internet users today, 84% access internet content at least part of the time using a mobile phone (including WAP). And 2.1 Billion mobile internet users (when WAP is included) means 31% of all mobile subscribers.

And then lets address the purists, who think we should only consider HTML 'real internet' even as most familiar browser-based internet services like Google Search, Facebook etc are available also via WAP - but yes, lets do 'real internet' on mobile. How many? 1.5 Billion ie 60% of all internet users, and 22% of all mobile subscribers. Note that this is still well above the total count of smartphones and 3G and WiFi users, because many featurephones have full HTML browsers, and especially in many Emerging World countries, even where 3G is not available, a 2.5G based cellular internet connection, at considerable cost, is far cheaper than attempting an unreliable landline based 'fixed' internet connection, at huge costs and often severe service disruptions.

To put this in another way. We know 400 million internet users do not use a mobile phone, they are 'pure' legacy PC based internet users, or down to only 16% of all internet users (remember, this was 100% of internet users only 13 years ago). There are 1.6 Billion PCs of any kind (desktops, laptops, tablets) and by today, almost all of those are connected to the web (not quite, but we can round it off now to 100%). And about 200 million more who share their access on the PC ie using an internet cafe etc. So 1.8 Billion who use the PC at least some of the time or 72%. Thus 28% of worldwide internet users ie 700 million people never use a PC at all and only use a mobile to access the internet, and a massive 84% of all internet users use a mobile at least part of the time. That tells us that 1.4 Billion people - and 56% of internet users actively use both a mobile phone (includes smartphones and basic phones including WAP) and a PC (including tablet PCs like iPad in PC definition). Yes, more than half of us internet users today use both a PC and a mobile phone to access the web. And by nearly 2 to 1 margin, the exclusive users now favor mobile-only over PC-only users.

There is a good reason so many now talk of a post-PC era and the legacy internet and the end of the mass market internet etc. The balance of users has already shifted to mobile and the game is tilting ever more in that direction.

PREMIUM SMS HAS 1.9 BILLION USERS

Do you vote for TV shows like American Idol or Eurovision Song Contest? Well, we measure that too. The various forms of premium SMS services from paying for your Coca Cola to checking into your airline with your boarding pass to paying for public transport and parking, to yes, voting on TV shows, the premium SMS market has reached 1.9 Billion paying customers. Huge. This is yes, almost twice the number of paid television subscription services, satellite, cable and digital TV systems, combined. Its 28% of all mobile subscribers and by far the most popular service type among Premium SMS is voting for TV shows. Roughly one in every 12 dollars earned by the global television industry comes from TV votes; Finland became the first country where Premium SMS revenues earned by TV outpaced advertising revenues AND subscription TV revenues. Some television franchises like Pop Idol earn in excess of half a Billion dollars in annual revenues, bonus above their usual TV advertising income, just out of premium SMS televotes. This is why I call Mobile the Magical Money-Making Machine in my books.

SEVERAL IN THE 1.2 BILLION OR SO RANGE

Then we have several more categories that are in the above 1 Billion user level. Apps are downloaded now by 1.2 Billion people (this includes Java based apps on featurephones as well as more advanced apps on smartphones). Gamers playing downloaded or networked games (ignoring pre-installed games that came with the handset) now number 1.2 Billion globally. Yes, 2.4 times more people play games on their mobile handsets than the total installed base of all stand-alone gaming consoles, tabletop and pocketable, combined.

1.3 Billion of us use search already on our mobile phones. Thats 19% of all mobile subscribers for those who are counting. Social networking like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In etc are used by 1.1 Billion people on mobile phones, both Facebook and Twitter announced this year 2012, that their half-point has been passed where now the majoirty of their users come from mobile phones, not PCs. And last but not least, ringback tones! RBTs have now 1.0 Billion global users, led by China and India obviously but highly popular in Russia, Indonesia, Turkey etc and increasingly also in more advanced Industrialized Countries of Europe and North America. In Asia-Pacific they have been the rage for some time already. How big is that? 15% of all mobile subscribers are now paying a monthly fee to have custom ringback tones via their networks and the music industry loves this subscription service as it cannot be pirated...

THATS IT. THE BIG NUMBERS ONCE AGAIN

So thats the big picture. Here to summarize the main numbers as the end of 2012 globally:

Yes, the above is all excerpted from the upcoming 2013 edition of the statistical yearbook TomiAhonen Almanac 2013. You may freely quote this blog and use any data in it and re-write any parts of this blog to better suit your readers. Just use the source as TomiAhonen Almanac 2013 and please also link to this blog, ok?

And if you don't happen to have the Almanac yet, I have a year-end special for you. Anyone who buys the 2012 edition now, gets both the 2012 edition now, and the new 2013 edition for no extra charge when that is finished in late January/early February of 2013. There is no reason to wait for the new edition. Get both for the price of one and get all of the current edition data now. The TomiAhonen Almanac 2012 is a massive 190 page volume as ebook/mbook in unrestricted pdf file, formated for your small screens of your iPhones, Galaxies and Blackberries, to have all the mobile data at your fingerprints. See more here TomiAhonen Almanac 2012.

August 09, 2012

The ultimate number in technology is upon us. Within months, literally, only months now, we will reach the point in time that there are more active mobile phone connections on the planet than human beings alive. Not 100% penetration 'by households' or 'by adults'. No. I mean 100% mobile penetration per capita. By humans alive. Counting literally everyone from babies to great grandparents.

This is totally, comprehensively unprecedented in the human history of technology. No tech ever, no tech, has even come close. Not television sets, not Playstations, not PCs, not Walkmans, not radios, not cars, not motorcycles, not even bicycles; not credit cards, not even bank accountsl; not books in print, not newspaper circulations; not the reach of electricity or landline telephones or even running water; not wristwatches, not toothbrushes, not even pens and pencils.. have been as widely used as mobile is today. And now comes the ultimate milestone. The first time ever, there will be a consumer technology that exceeds the whole human population by its size.

This is the big picture. This is the biggest story there ever was in any technology, ever. The most widely reaching technology ever - by a massive margin by now - and what is more, mobile is not just a telecommunication tool, it is also a digital, interactive mass media channel. It is also a payment channel. And it is the ultimate technology cannibal.

This is your primer to understanding the most radical, utterly disruptive technology there ever was, and what it is doing now, and where it is headed next. This is a long blog, so set yourself some time. But if you are in telecoms, or media, or advertising, or the financial industry, or in travel, or retail, or education, or healthcare, or well, almost any industry from farming to fishing to forestry to funerals - mobile will change your life. This is your guide to your digital future. Do grab a cup of coffee and follow me after the break here to an adventure into the electronic eldorado, the digital klondyke that we call mobile. We are about to pass the Mobile Moment. That point in time, where humans for the first time ever, found a consumer technology that had grown larger than the total human population itself.

June 12, 2012

Lets talk print today. The print media has been under quite heavy assault for many years now from the internet and mobile. Some take cover in doing their print titles on new digital platforms like custom editions for the iPad for example, or a smartphone version etc. Other print titles have resorted to far simpler versions from SMS news alerts and mobile web versions to having custom Twitter feeds etc. Yeah, all that is good, in terms of exploring the digital world. But that is not the future of print.

Don't misunderstand me, there is huge growth to be had in doing news online or on mobile and/or on tablet PCs wherever you categorize those devices. I mean print, print as in 1st mass media print. Books, newspapers, magazines and billboards, catalogs, brochures. Paper. Print. And I don't mean some kind of Sci Fi paper with some electronic threads or paper-like thin displays. I mean pulp, from a tree, via a sawmill. Paper. Print. A printing press. I want to talk about the future of the 1st mass media today.

Oh, for new visitors, just one refresher course if you haven't caught up with the latest writing. The 8 mass media are in chronological order:

1st Mass Medium: Print from the 1500s2nd Mass Mediun: Recordings from late 1800s3rd Mass Medium: Cinema from about 19004th Mass Medium: Radio from the 1920s5th Mass Medium: Television from the 1950s6th Mass Medium: Internet form the 1990s7th Mass Medium: Mobile from the 2000s8th Mass Medium: Augmented Reality from the 2010s

PRINT IS NOT GONNA DIE, GET OVER IT

There is always panic with old media when a new media channel comes along. When radio appeared, there were huge fights with the recording industry about who was stealing whose content and many experts thought that free music on radio would kill the recordings industry. Well? We are now 90 years into that experiment, I think its safe to say that Lady Gaga and 50 Cent can sleep safely that their recording industry is still alive. Yes, its had its ups and downs but its not going away.

There were lots of media experts who suggested that when those darnfangeled television sets would come to every home, it would surely kill the cinema industry. That hypothesis has now had 60 years and as far as I can see, there is a new James Bond adventure coming with 007 Skyfall and I will surely stand in line for the ticket. No city I know of has closed all its multiplex screens yet.

The lesson we get from cinema and TV, is that TV did use all cinema content ever made, but that was not enough. TV needed more, and created its own content and formats that will not even work on cinema - consider music videos like on MTV or gameshows and reality TV. Those work excellently on TV but are not viable in the movies. What cinema also found, was that some formats were not competitive against television. Newsreels. Did you know that in the 1930s and 1940s it was very normal to go to the movies and see short news films from around the world about major events. Remember nobody had TVs at home, this was like watching the TV news. The sporting results from the Olympics or a royal wedding or the news from the second world war. Those 'newsreels' became obsolete when television news would reach the majority of homes in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Radio the 4th mass medium did not kill Recordings the 2nd mass medium. Television the 5th mass medium did not kill Cinema the 3rd mass medium. And no, the Internet 6th mass medium nor Mobile the 7th mass medium will not kill Print the 1st mass medium. But just like how Cinema had to adjust to TV, so too will Print have to adjust to the Internet and Mobile (and Augmented Reality).

THE DEADWOOD FORMATS

Some formats of print are totally obsolete and deserved to die. When there was no other way, the Yellow Pages and White Pages phone books were a valid way to let people know who had telephones, what were their telephone numbers, etc. The Yellow Pages were a 'better than nothing' way to find out who was a locksmith or dentist or attorney. Today Google does all that for us. An Encyclopedia was often a sign of an enlightened, learned, civilized family. It was the first place you went to seek information. Today we go to Google or Wikipedia for that info. These were large heavy print titles, formats, that served a need when there was no better way to deliver the information. They are long gone by now - and good riddance! How many trees died needlessly in the last decade in never-opened editions of published Yellow Pages and White Pages and various Encyclopedia and Dictionaries and Thesauruses etc.

This is like Newsreels were in Cinema. They served a purpose once, but were not the best use of that medium, and certainly were inferior in delivering their intended content to their audience. Like listening to live sports on Radio. If we do have live TV coverage, that is what we prefer, even as some radio announcers were brilliant radio personalities haha.. But then Radio would adjust and invent new formats like say Drive Time radio which you can't do on TV. Or in the case of Cinema, they stopped most low-budget 'Serials' movies and shifted upstream to higher budget features with superstar actors like your George Clooneys and Angelina Jolies etc. TV can do great drama like in Mad Men but its no James Bond epic haha..

SO HOW IS PRINT DOING DIGITAL THEN?

So this is not 'repurposing' your content to other media - like showing a rerun of James Bond on a Saturday on TV. I am not talking about taking your magazine or newspaper and creating a digital edition of the page to the iPod or internet or mobile. No. I mean lets turn the traditional printed page into a fully digital, interactive mass media experience. Lets help the First Mass Medium with the some digital love by the Eighth Mass Medium - yes, Augmented Reality.

And how do we do this? You know the QR code obviously (2D Barcode). It lets any printed page like a printed advertisement or the label on a can of Pepsi or a business card or airline boarding pass, to be able to be read by cameraphones and then various actions can be programmed into the QR code. It can include a web link for example.

Now take that one step further. The QR code is a standardized and usually relatively small, about postage-stamp sized square of black and white dots. Now what if you had the intellect to detect a more advanced image? Like a specific page of a magazine (one with a couple of pictures for example). The intelligence would be smart enough not to be triggered just by seeing one of those pictures, they have to be in the correct layout, in the correct relative sizes, and there needs to be the right pattern of text on that page too. The detail and unique abilities to personalize the page is nearly infinite, far far more than what is ever possible in traditional QR codes.

This is not science fiction. This existed in the laboratory for a few years and has been turned commercial earlier this year, led by our friends Layar of the Netherlands, the AR people. They now have in their commercially launched products, the technology to allow any printed page with illustrations (so not just text) including diagrams, pictures, graphics - and that can be tagged as the identifier for digital content. After that, we get magic. Consider this (this is not done by Layar's solution, this is an earlier technology as a one-off for this magazine advertisement), one of my fave examples of some teenager-boy aged marketing from the UK by the deodorant brand Axe/Lynx. The printed page does not show the girl fully, but take out your phone, and you can see her:

This is just one very early and simple version of what we can do with AR on a print magazine. The paper in this magazine is nothing special, just a normal printed magazine. In this case the Lynx/Axe app needs to be installed to a suitable smartphone and then look at the picture..

Beyond this, we can do just about anything digital. We can add voices and sounds. We can add videos and animation. We can show before and after images. We can show work in progress. In the Netherlands there is for example a comic book which is AR enabled. One of the features is that fans of the comic can see the same exact comic book page in draft form, how it was before the artist finished the frames. Perhaps the person was looking in another direction in the earlier draft, etc..

What do you need to read it? A smartphone with the Layar app. Layar launched 2 years ago out of the Netherlands and has reached 19 million installs and has 3 million active users worldwide. I estimated last month, that their Netherlands user base is about 1.5 million which is about 8% of the total population of that country. If we take it as a percentage of Dutch smartphone owners, its past 15%. That is not a niche market, my dear reader. That is the start of the Mass Market. Yes, AR is a Mass Media now, not just a tech nerdy niche geeky thingy.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MAGALOGUE.

So yeah. I was in Amsterdam last month and visited with the Layar offices and saw some of the cool stuff they are doing. I also met with the digital people over at vtwonen, the biggest interior decoration magazine of the Netherlands. So this is your typical magazine about interior decoration ideas, your lamps, curtains, kitchens, furniture, etc..They showed their first ever Magalogue that was an insert to their regularly published vtwonen print issue this March. What is a magalogue? Magazine + Catalogue = Magalogue.

A magazine tells stories, usually with plenty of pictures. A catalogue is very different. Think Ikea, or Sears. A catalogue is intended to sell. So the catalogue has to give pertinent information to help you decide about buying. In the case of furniture, for example, it has to tell you not only how much it costs, but its dimensions. Does that bookcase fit in your living room? And it has to tell you about colors and fabrics and materials used. Often with various furnishings there are variations or options etc. A sofa may be in four-seater and 3-seater and 2-seater. Plus easy-chair, sleeper-chair and ottoman. Etc. To cram that type of info in a catalog takes a lot of text and 'wastes' paper. The catalogue becomes heavy. And then it gets also cumbersome. The similar items need to be near each other. We don't look for our bed choices from several pictures of bedrooms. We want to see the beds only, next to each other, all in a series of pages with only beds. This is not good for telling stories. Its the 'phone book' version of a spy thriller book haha.. You either have one (a magazine with stories, but not room to do the catalogue selling) or the other. But not both.

Until now. Enter the Magalogue. vtwonen used their editorial staff to create real interior-decorating type stories and tips, but using specific items that were all for sale (by multiple providers). This is like what if the Ikea catalogue was mixed on 'random play' on an iPod haha, none of the book cases were on the same pages, but rather, each book case was set into a suitable story about an actual room, and an actual interior decoration need. Its like no catalogue I've ever seen. Every page has an actual story, with pictures of a realistic mixture of products for sale. The products are obviously carefully selected in the right colors and shades so they fit together as if selected by an interior design architect (as the writers invariably would be). But the pages are not cluttered with endless columns of tiny text describing every item in detail. Yes, there is a single description of every item (only its name and its price) but all other info is now hidden in the AR app.

If you like the towels on page 18 but wonder if it comes in the shade of blue you prefer over that green in the picture, you take out your phone, look at that page and you'll have the link to that item. Here are the colors, here are the sizes, here are the prices... and here is the link to your shopping basket if you want to buy.

Now we can have tons tons TONS more. We can have experts giving advice on that item. We can have video on how that picture was made and what other items were considered. We can have variations of that same set up with alternate colors, etc etc etc etc etc.

And this is NOT a catalogue! There is not that heavy weight of all those pages of most unncessary pages in the back with all the detail about every item, their shipping weights, sizes, etc. No. We don't need that. Its all in the AR app. The 'catalogue' is removed form the 'logue' and the Magazine is added. Now we have a very nice fresh magazine that happens to be selling every item in the pictures, and you can get more info than ever was possible in any printed catalogue. Magazine + Catalogue = Magalogue. Brilliant idea!

Wait - I forgot the best part - its not static! If you want to make changes to your content, that can be altered at your end (you the publisher). So there is a price change. So there is a new color. Now there is a TV show that mentions that item and some celebrity said its cool. You want that video also in your page. You can make changes to the digital links of a print page already published !!!! It allows you to keep your printed page 'alive' and relevant for much longer, with updated content elements!!!

And coming back from the 1st Mass Media to the 8th. I mentioned that I did my first TED talk at TEDx Mongkok two weeks ago, on the theme of Augmented Reality (and mentioned print media uses too). You may want to see this video, its only 20 minutes but the early reviews are that I got the angle pretty much dead-on about why Augmented Reality is the 8th Mass Media channel, and why it is relevant now in 2012. See Tomi at TEDx Mongkok talking about Augmented Reality as 8th Mass Media.

I blogged about my TED talk here in Hong Kong. It was at TEDx Mongkok and the theme of the evening was Chaos and I spoke about Augmented Reality as the 8th Mass Media. The video is now up, please go see it if you are interested in the future of mass media and digital convergence. Tomi's TEDx Talk about AR as the 8th Mass Media.

May 24, 2012

I just delivered a presentation at the first ever TEDx Mongkok event here in Hongkong's hectic Mongkok region. The theme of the event was 'Chaos' and we had a great lineup of speakers around that topic.

TEDX MONGKOK CHAOS

Just to show how chaotic it was as an event, it wasn't even held in Mongkok but in nearby Tsim Sha Tsui. Perhaps the most memorable element of the chaos was the presentation by Dr Kay Ottik, of University of Leningrad in Russia, on Organizational Dynamics Embrace Chaos. Her lecture was interrupted by a heckler, a fellow Russian expert who accused Dr Ottik of plagiarism of a third Russian expert on the topic, and Dr Ottik handled the hecling by pointing out that because the heckler follows her around the world, he must be in love with her. She had the whole audience read outloud some obscure reserch paper synopsis, and then her presentation itself was interrupted by spontaneous dancing from the audience by dozens of dancers.

It was a hoax, a fake presentation! A fantastic way to help give a break to the event in the afternoon session after lunch. Professor Kay Ottik doesn't exist (I found a total of 6 Google entries for that name, and supposedly this University of Leningrad professor has had broad exposure to the industry). The University of Leningrad explicitly doesn't exist as such, and has never existed, but there was a "Communist University of Leningrad". The city of Leningrad of the Soviet Union has years ago changed its name back to the original St Petersburg and yes, there is of course a St Petersburg University. But yes, absolutely great fake presentation and she was that good, she even had me totally fooled, her slides and talk seemed very topical and relevant, etc. She was in reality Australian/Hong Kong improvisational actress Kay Ross whose day job is around marketing. What a fantastic performance! Truly fantastic and what an unbelievable way to help bring chaos to our event at TEDx Mongkok Chaos. I will post a link to the full presentation when it is up. Congratulations Kay and the full improv team. Bravo!

I also want to mention the most astonishing presentation by any teenagers I have ever seen. TEDx Mongkok invited youth contributions by 16 year olds from Hong Kong schools, to join in a short 4 minute session. Over 50 submissions were made and only one was the winner, and it was incredible. Two 16 year old boys, Andrew McBain and Vincent Wang did a suberb 'performance' more even than a speech (with choreography etc) about education for a modern age, entitled 'Us bad educate; are problem'. You HAVE to see it and bear in mind, these are not professional stage performers with a decade of experience, they are teenager boys. I will post the link here as soon as I get it.

So yes, it was my honor to be part of the first ever TEDx by the TEDx Mongkok team. Thank you so much, Now, what was my presentation? Well, being the most-published author in mobile with 12 books already on that topic, and doing my first TED related event, naturally my topic was... not mobile. Isn't that chaos as well? It was the first full presentation I have ever given on the topic of the 8th mass medium - Augmented Reality (AR). Yes, I have of course included AR in my presentations for many years now, but always only a side story, perhaps a couple of slides at best. Today was the first full presentation I did just focused on AR. I will of course post the video as soon as TEDx get it up, but here is a blog version of what I think of AR as the 8th mass medium, roughly in line with the presentation, and adding some links, stats, and some more examples.

I'd also like to credit the source of my opening joke. I told a variation of the joke I believe was first told on Twitter by George Bray Twittering as @georgebray, a 20 year videogaming industry veteran, whose hilarious Tweet more than a year ago was: "Your mobile phone has more computing power than all of NASA in 1969. NASA launched a man to the moon. We launch a bird into pigs." I expanded that a bit and brought some personal angles to it, but the root of my opening joke is this tweet from 22 March 2011. When we have the full video, you'll see my version.

THE 8TH MASS MEDIA CHANNEL

So, lets start with the real content of the TEDx Talk. I was the person first arguing in any book that mobile was a unique mass medium and was not just a copy of the internet; that a mobile phone was more than just a pocket computer. That was ten years ago. I then kept exploring early data services, apps and content on mobile from messaging to music to gaming to news to advertising to payments to telematics to mGovernment and mLearning and mHealtcare etc. Along the way the media part kept growing, so I released a book in 2008 purely about how media content thrives (and makes money, and differs from the internet and legacy media) on mobile. News, games, music, internet, search, social media, advertising etc. Mobile as the 7th of the Mass Media was a global betseller and many say it is still my best book today, and that it is very valid today, with totally relevant modern topical case studies, theories and lessons. In the book I explained the 7 Mass Media taxonomy which is familiar to regular readers of this blog obviously, as:

The 7 Mass Media taxonomy has been very useful in exploring the differences and similarities in the media space. So for example cinema and television were both 'multimedia' moving pictures media. Many thought TV would kill cinema, it didn't. All current cinema content is also repurposed for television. But some early cinema content died after TV came along. Cinema used to have for example 'newsreels' ie the video news of the world, before we had nightly TV news at home. So in the 1930s and 1940s it was quite common to go to the movies to see the news shown before the main feature. These newsreels carried video coverage of major news events like the Olympics, or the Hindenburg zeppelin disaster, and of course the second world war.

Similarly we can see that radio and recordings were such a similar area, where both offered music for example, both were sound-based mass media and again, when radio was introduced, many thought it would kill the recordings industry. Or we can see that while they offer very different content, television and radio are 'cousins' in mass media, both being 'broadcast' media so their distribution method and to a large degree also their revenue model is the same, very distinct from say print and cinema.. and so forth.

So lets see what AR was like. The technology came from the military, jet fighter pilots have AR based helmets and goggles where a fighter pilot will see 'circles' around the different fighter planes in the sky, as they fly in 3D space at Mach 2 speeds whirling around each other and firing long-range missiles at each other. You don't want to accidentially shoot down a plane from your own side, not when fighter planes cost 30 million dollars a piece and your air force might only have 50 fighter planes in total haha.. So the technology had evolved to identify enemy planes and mark them with red circles in the helmet, and your friendly forces with blue circles, so you always see who is on your side and who is the enemy. Very valuable tech useful in modern war.

Now, the technology emerged onto the civilian side in 2009. The first campaign of AR use in advertising was a Ford campaign from Europe to promote a new Ford Ka automobile. The AR campaign was mostly a gimmick, only few phones were capable of being used for this, required several steps by the consumers, but yes, you could go to an empty street, where a virtual Ford Ka was 'parked' and this invisible car would become visible through only your mobile phone screen. Cool, but perhaps nerdy campaign. But it was the start.

The first big step towards AR moving to a valid mass market platform came with the launch of Layar in the Netherlands, the world's first AR Browser. Yes we have web browsers like Google Chrome (congratulations by the way, we have just heard this week that Chrome has passed Internet Exploder as the most used web browser in the world) and Firefox etc. Now we have the world's first browser to explore AR and yes, its called Layar. Layar launched in 2009.

In my talk I showed a short clip from the original 2009 video from Layar. If you the reader of this blog do not know what is AR, please take the two minutes to see this video, this is a perfect simple guide to show you what is basic AR, what was already possible in 2009 in Amsterdam Netherlands, on Android smartphones. How AR might help a tourist in Amsterdam navigate maps, find a cash machine/ATM, find an apartment for sale, find a restaurant or bar, etc. Please see the video and then lets look at where AR has evolved since.

Ok. What else did we see coming? The platform Layar created enabled thousands of 'layers' to be created superimposed over reality. We can do yes, the 'radar' to find things in the city as we walk around lost or as tourists, but there is so much more, we can now do.

SOME AR EXAMPLES ON SMARTPHONES TODAY

The smartphone platforms soon evolved to enable AR on other smartphones beyond just Androids. And with the Layar platform ever more clever ideas emerged. Plus there are AR solutions that also are made independently as smartphone apps. Some of my favorites include:

The Lynx campaign (AXE) deodorant from the UK. This is an actual magazine ad. Lynx/AXE is a youth deodorant targeting teenager boys. So they will of course be very interested in seeing the sexy girl. But the print magazine has only the white spots and you can't see the full girl. Take out your smartphone and see the sexy girl in full. The ad is made interactive, this is cool, sexy, and helps drive Lynx/AXE sales.

Then lets go to something less frivolous and more practical. Another very early AR solution was from Idea in Germany, where they provided the AR based 'furniture virtual trial' for your home. Take items from the Ikea catalog and have the sofa or table or bookcase image on your cameraphone, then move your cameraphone to point at the place in your room, to position the sofa to see if it fits, do you like the colors, does it fit with your other furnishings like your curtains, carpets etc. I have created a mock-up of what this would look like:

Note, in the above picture, the background is the real home with no sofa, the cameraphone view has the Ikea sofa that you can then position to your room, to do a virtual trial, before buying the actual sofa and having it delivered to your home.

MAGICAL BINOCULARS

I have been often talking about some of the AR innovations as a kind of magical binoculars. You know, regular binoculars make the view bigger, when you look for some birds or boats or airplanes far away. AR can be like a magical binoculars, not making things bigger, but showing something that doesn't exist anymore, or hasn't been built yet, or showing action where there is none etc.

So yes, we have for example the Berlin Wall AR version. You can travel to Berlin today, and the Berlin Wall doesn't exist anymore. But you can walk along the path where the Berlin Wall used to stand, and see it through an AR solution. Better even than the original wall, we can now go to both sides of the wall and see it from either side. What did the Berlin Wall look like to communist East Germany side, where they saw just the rooftops of West Berlin (and the barbed wire and machine guns etc that were used to shoot Germans who tried to climb the wall to escape East Germany to the West). And you can walk to the West German side, and see the graffiti etc that was on the wall from the West Germany view.

There are many other such uses, for example the World Trade Center twin towers of Manhattan of course don't exist anymore but they have been recreated as an AR version. You can take a picture of yourself with the World Trade Center towers even as they don't exist anymore.

Its not just stationary things and still items like a building. There are historical battlefields of the USA Civil War, that have been animated based on real actors who perform the re-enactments of the major battles. Some of those are now available as AR views. So imagine going to Gettysburg and standing on the actual battlefield as the Confederate soliders in grey uniforms get ready to fight with the Union troops in blue uniforms. You can stand on the open peaceful historical field, and looking through the smartphone, you can see the two armies as they do battle. Its like stepping into the middle of a movie as it is happening..

And this keeps evolving. We just learned earlier in May, that british TV personality James May of Top Gear has gone to some UK museums, and now offers the James May tour of the museum, as an AR tour guide. You have James May walking with you in the museum and he tells you his version of what he thinks is of interest in the museum's exhibits. We had dynosaurs just attacking London a few weeks ago, celebrating the 100 year anniversary of Universal. Life size Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaurs were rampaging all across Oxford street, only visible via smartphone AR views. There are all sorts of AR games and solutions and fun. Magical views to reality. Seeing the past, seeing the future, seeing what never even existed (dynosaurs never walked in London)

COMBINING VR AND AR

So then the really exciting parts come from digital convergence of course. What if we add virtual reality (VR) to augmented reality. We see this for example in the Japanese invention of the iButterfly. The iButterfly has since flown also here to Hong Kong and to Germany etc. The iButterfly is a large virtual reality 'game' covering huge area such as a city, even a country. In it there are, like in the real world, lots of butterflies. The iButterflies are regionally specific so in different parts of town, you'll have different colors. And to hunt them for your collection - you need a smartphone with the iButterfly AR app. Every time you capture one of the iButterflies, you get a coupon, such as here in Hong Kong to Pacific Coffee. Sounds like a gimmick? Not so fast. Here in Hong Kong we've had 300,000 users download the app and they've caught 10 million iButterflies in less than a year. How relevant is that? We have 7 million people in Hong Kong, so 4% of the total Hong Kong population has already used iButterfly - in just a year. And not all have smartphones. Across Hong Kong smartphone users its 7%. That is getting to be very serious mass market size, for a brand new mass media. To put it in context, globally only 6% of us buy a daily newspaper!

And then lets go back to Japan. What is happening in the AR and VR space there? Japan's latest craze is 'Balloon Fishing'. How can I explain it? Imagine a game of fishing, where they create a virtual lake that covers all of Japan. But you can't fish just anywhere. For you to be able to fish, you have to have an Augmented Reality 'portal' to access the virtual lake. Now your smartphone is not enough, you also need liquid. So you have to find some real world liquid, like in a cup of tea, or a bowl of soup, or a glass of water. Now you can start fishing. This is bizarre, whimsical, fun and addictive. I really can't do it justice, please go take a look at the video of Balloon Fishing.

The area of AR is vastly expanding and ripe with innovation. We have AR in shopping, such as the Adidas T-shirt tester. We have AR in boating, as a low-cost 'virtual radar' to see where the other boats and ships are for example if there is a fog and you can't see - you don't want to have an accident with your boat and AR can help you see what other ships and boats are out there - and more importantly, in what direction they are moving. AR can help animate window displays in stores and magazines and catalogs in print. This is truly a magical creative opportunity and I could write about new AR ideas literally every day. But is it for real or is it only a tech nerdy geek thing?

GLOBAL SIZE

So we go back to Layar. They just spoke at the big event in Amstedam where I gave a keynote two weeks ago. Layar reported that they have now been installed on 19 million phones and their active user base has passed 3 million people. If we say (this is my conjecture purely) that half of those are in the Netherlands, as Layar is a Dutch company and most of their active layers are in that country - that would be 1.5 million people. What is the population of the Netherlands? 16.6 million people. So if 1.5 million already use Layar, that is 9% of the Dutch population. Ten percent is roughly where the 'early adopter' market limit is seen and we 'cross the chasm' to go mass market. Across smartphone owners in the Netherlands its already 16% !!! So soon as the smartphone penetration approaches all phones in a few years, certainly the Layar user base in the Netherlands will pass one in six Dutch people. How big is that? Thats the scale of total personal computer penetration rate globally!!!! If you think the PC based internet is a 'real' mass market media haha, Google, YouTube, Facebook and all that - within Dutch smartphone users, the adoption rate is roughly the same, as global PC penetration rate. And this, in barely over two years from launch.

So I do want to point out, Layar has evolved a lot since 2009. They now are for example digitizing and adding AR to print magazines - thousands of Dutch print magazine pages have been turned interactive with Layar's solutions already (and they started this service only earlier this year). I got a copy of a special edition of the Dutch home decorations magazine vtwonen. They have just released a 'magalogue' - which combined a magazine with a catalog. So its a full printed magazine about home decoration which is also a catalog and on every page you have digital animations, AR links, more info, videos, pictures, different colors, info about the product such as what materials it is made of, etc; and yes, being a catalog, you can make instant purchases right as you sit at home and decide you like that lamp... Again, like so much in AR, this is difficult to explain well in writing, please go see the video of vtwonen and their Magalogue.

But yes. We have 4% of the people here in Hong Kong using AR in one year. We have 9% of the total Dutch population using AR in two years from launch. What does this mean for the industry? I compared the launch of AR (8th) mass media to the launch of mobile (7th) mass media and did a comparison. I estimate that very conservatively, globally at the end of 2011, there were 5 million AR users globally, in very round numbers. In reality it is more than 5 million but certainly not yet 10 million. But what is that in comparison to mobile? Mobile mass media launched in 1998 with the first downloadable ringing tone (from Finland). Mobile then saw the mobile internet launched in Japan in 1999. The first 5 million mobile media audience was achieved in two years.

I projected the same growth path of (7th mass media) mobile media to (8th mass media) AR media, and the pattern suggests will will pass 1 billion AR users by year 2020 !!! Yes, before this decade is done, we will see 1 billion users of AR. That is yes, folks, twice as big as global newspaper circulations are today. That is massive. Don't miss this opportunity! AR is a new mass medium and it will be huge in this decade.

Well, then in the second part of the TEDx Mongkok Chaos talk, I showed a few short simulations of what AR might be like here in Hong Kong. I went to Mongkok over the weekend, shot some videos, and created simple simulations to show what kind of tech I foresee as early AR media solutions. I think those are best seen from the video, so while we wait for the TEDx video to be uploaded, let me just summarize on a few videos for now, to add some other views.

And then to the future. What is someone like say.. Google thinking of AR? We just had the first major view by Google of AR and they have given their vision of AR beyond the smartphone, when AR moves to our eyeglasses. This is sci-fi stuff, that will become reality well before this decade is done. If you want to understand how different the second half of this decade is, from today, please go see this video about Google Glass (ie 'Google Goggles'). This is visionary stuff, yet the tech is within some years from commercial launch - we will have this on our faces well before the decade is done. See Google Glass.

May 03, 2012

The presentation looks at how will money be made in the future of telecoms. I discuss such critical topics to telecoms as 'Peak SMS' how long can text messaging revenues and profits sustain mobile, smartphone migration rate, how long will it take and can all phones become smarthpones, and my latest view to the Grand Convergence we will see this decade. I talk about the astonishing developments in mobile money, the 9 Unique Abilities of Mobile, and what happens when money and advertising merge - ie Advocurrency. The presentation runs 50 minutes and the video is very well produced. Oh, and even if you don't want to see the full video, check out the video at about 47:30 what happened on stage haha, this is a memorable event for me for that reason (was first time for me haha)

April 26, 2012

This is so amazing. While this is the quarterly reporting season and thus there are many stories here on the Communities Dominate blog about smartphones, there is life in the world beyond smartphones too. And this is a truly amazing story. Plus its about a rapper and me being one of the world's oldest white dude European fans of rap music haha - of course I have to celebrate the return of Tupac.

Tupac Shakur was a chart-topping rapper who was killed very early in his career. There are some recordings of his performances and some music videos etc. But now, a company called AV Concepts has worked with the record label and helped create a virtual avatar version of Tupac. So this is not using his films and videos to create something out of past recordings like they did for example with Michael Jackson's death. No, this is an actual human-sized and very realistic robotic avatar, created with programming not just to look like Tupac but to move like him with his mannerisms etc, and of course to sound like him. And that virtual Tupac just made his stage debut in California with Dr Dre and Snoop Doggy Dog.

Now, this is not a real holograph like say the Princess Leia character in Star Wars. This is using a magician's stage trick with a projection on a glass pane, but to the audience he looks perfectly real and the two other rappers were able to choreograph their moves and rhymes to work with Virtual Tupac. It is the modern digital virtual electronic version of a animatronic puppet like you might see in Disneyland but this is far more realistic, and it being only software, they can easily make this new Virtual Tupac to change his dance moves, sing different lyrics, say hello to the audience etc. It is VERY cool technology. Take a look at the AV Concepts site for a video. And here is MTV news covering the story.

April 11, 2012

I'm the guy credited with the term '7th mass medium' which explains why mobile is unique and distinct mass media from say comparing to the internet or TV or print. Since my book came out (Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media) in 2008 (a global tech bestseller, thank you all who bought it) - many keep asking me what is the 8th mass media. And up to now, I have said I don't know.

Last year a friend and colleague of mine, Raimo van der Klein (a long-time MoMoista - Mobile Monday - from the Amsterdam MoMo chapter) now the CEO of Layar, the Augmented Reality (AR) browser company, suggested that AR is the 8th mass medium. I thought about it then, and as the only commercially practical uses of AR in 'mass market' uses (for consumer media, not for example military goggles for fighter pilots) were on smartphones, I felt AR was only a media format for mobile. I did immediately accept that AR was at least the 8th unique ability of mobile haha, for which obviously Raimo gets the credit. And I told him I'd keep my mind open about it and consider what evidence we might have of the future of AR.

Now I read a Tweet from another very dear friend of mine, Antti Ohrling, known in the past for co-creating Blyk and earlier for his award-winning digital ad agency of Finland, Contra. Antti is one of those superduper bright people that whenever you meet, you feel like you want more time, and just hope you could take a tin-can opener, open up their brain, and just eat it all.. Like you know, our Alan Moore, or Dan Applequist or Jouko Ahvenainen or Richard Ting or Jonathan MacDonald or Lars Cosh-Ishii or Russell Buckley or Matti Makkonen or Mike Smith or Rory Sutherland. People who really REALLY get mobile - and get digital - and have lived this industry for decades and have enormous insights. So Antti retweeted something about those cool Google glasses we heard of last week. He did not even make the statement that shook me, it was an article written at Tech Crunch by Josh Constine, entitled 'Apple and Facebook should be Terrified of Google-Tinted Glasses'. Now, the headline is somewhat typical 'hype' headline as most modern tech articles seem to be (just look at my overhyped blog article titles often haha). But for Antti to bother to retweet that, I sensed Antti agreed with the sentiment of that headline..

And I would trust Antti's judgement 100% (I am tempted to say 101% but I am too much the stats-nut to know its not possible to give more than 100% haha) and it didn't take me long into that article for a massive thought to emerge. Yes, AR is cool on smartphones. But that is 'part time' use of AR. What if AR was the first unavoidable mass media channel? The first pervasively consumed mass media? Mobile phones as we know from the 7th Mass Media theory, have unique abilites such as being always connected and being permanently carried. So too will be AR (on glasses) but we don't consume media on our phones in uninterrupted way. The media consumption is in our pocket but we also put it into our pocket, away. These AR glasses by Google will change all that. We are seeing the birth of the first pervasive mass media (that might not be the best term, I have to think about it). So yes, am ready to call it. Augmented Reality is the 8th Mass Medium. And thank you Raimo van der Klein for discovering it, and for first postulating that might be so. I am your first convert haha. Here is the new list in order of their introduction:

Note also how instrumential Google has been in this development. The first Layar AR mass market solutions were on Android smartphones. And now again its Google goggles that helped jumpstart this fledgling media industry. Wow. Google is 'creating' a massive digital media environment for itself to thrive in. If anyone learned the lesson of 'creating new market space' haha as Alan Moore and I argued in the signature book to this blog, Communities Dominate Brands, where we used Apple's iPod and iTunes as the perfect case example - haha, Google learned that lesson and then put the Google massive scale spin to it indeed. This is a new mass medium and it will be massive. MASSIVE. I would suggest immediately that it will be far bigger than the 5th media TV and 6th media internet, and I am willing to suggest, it may become bigger than mobile the 7th media itself. Awesome!

I will return with much more on this but for now, wanted to post it and celebrate. Now we know what came after mobile as a mass media channel, it is AR. Feel free to share the info, the updated list, and links to this blog. Am looking forward to comments!

Available for Consulting and Speakerships

Available for Consulting & Speaking

Tomi Ahonen is a bestselling author whose twelve books on mobile have already been referenced in over 100 books by his peers. Rated the most influential expert in mobile by Forbes in December 2011, Tomi speaks regularly at conferences doing about 20 public speakerships annually. With over 250 public speaking engagements, Tomi been seen by a cumulative audience of over 100,000 people on all six inhabited continents. The former Nokia executive has run a consulting practise on digital convergence, interactive media, engagement marketing, high tech and next generation mobile. Tomi is currently based out of Hong Kong but supports Fortune 500 sized companies across the globe. His reference client list includes Axiata, Bank of America, BBC, BNP Paribas, China Mobile, Emap, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HSBC, IBM, Intel, LG, MTS, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Ogilvy, Orange, RIM, Sanomamedia, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Three, Tigo, Vodafone, etc. To see his full bio and his books, visit www.tomiahonen.com Tomi Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on next generation mobile and digital convergence. Follow him on Twitter as @tomiahonen. Tomi also has a Facebook and Linked In page under his own name. He is available for consulting, speaking engagements and as expert witness, please write to tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com

Google Search

Communities dominate brands

The WWW

Tomi's eBooks on Mobile Pearls

Pearls Vol 1: Mobile AdvertisingTomi's first eBook is 171 pages with 50 case studies of real cases of mobile advertising and marketing in 19 countries on four continents. See this link for the only place where you can order the eBook for download

Tomi Ahonen Almanac 2009

Tomi Ahonen Almanac 2009A comprehensive statistical review of the total mobile industry, in 171 pages, has 70 tables and charts, and fits on your smartphone to carry in your pocket every day.